New Book: “The British Are Coming”

Pulitzer Prize winning author Rick Atkinson has recently published the first book in The Revolution Trilogy, The British Are Coming where he relates the history of the colonies just before the Revolutionary War and the early parts of the war itself. Atkinson brings historic events to life with a descriptive and emotional writing style more typical of a fiction writer but wrapped around detailed and exhaustively researched historical details.

Reviews of The British Are Coming include the following:

To say that Atkinson can tell a story is like saying Sinatra can sing…. It is as if Ken Burns somehow gained access to a time machine, traveled back to the Revolutionary era, then captured historical scenes on film as they were happening…. It is difficult to imagine any reader putting this beguiling book down without a smile and a tear.

—Joseph J. Ellis, The New York Times Book Review

For sheer dramatic intensity, swinging from the American catastrophes at Quebec and Fort Washington to the resounding and surprising successes at Trenton and Princeton, all told in a way equally deeply informed about British planning and responses, there are few better places to turn.

—The Washington Post