REVIEWS ENTRANCES AND EXITS
The British Are Coming: The War for America—Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777
By Rick Atkinson.
Henry Holt and Company, 2019. $40.
Reviewed by T. Cole Jones
John Adams thought the Revolutionary War had nothing to do with the American Revolution. “The Revolution was in the Minds of the People,” Adams wrote, “and this was effected… before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” Rick Atkinson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of a masterful trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, begs to differ. The British Are Coming is the first volume of a projected three-part series that promises to be the definitive battle history of the American Revolution. If the next two volumes are as good as this one, Atkinson’s trilogy will do just that.
Covering the military campaigns of the Revolution from the skirmish at Lexington Green through George Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton, is military narrative at its best—exhaustively researched, deeply contextualized, and evocatively told. Atkinson breathes new life into familiar characters like Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and King George III, while foregrounding the experiences and elevating the voices of ordinary Americans and Britons. He makes a concerted effort not to demonize the Crown’s forces or to glorify
