After writing lapidary narratives about Americans facing disaster and death at sea, Nathaniel Philbrick turned to telling twice- and even thrice-told tales of bravery and ordeal on land. His books on the early Pilgrim settlers and on Custer's Last Stand breathed new life into their dramas, with fresh research and a readiness to admit the worst as well as portray the best about history's heroes and heroines. With "Bunker Hill," Mr. Philbrick turns to one of the most retold tales in the American historical lexiconâ??how Boston started the American Revolution.
The book opens in June 1775, with 7-year-old John Quincy Adams standing beside his mother, Abigail, in Braintree, Mass., while the thunderous battle of Bunker Hill is in bloody progress 10 miles away. Roughly seven decades later Adams remembered his family's fear that the victorious British army might sally out from Boston and slaughter everyone in its path. An even more painful memory was the later report that their beloved family physician, Dr. Joseph Warren, was among the battle's dead.
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