Book of the week: Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick

(Viking, $33)

Nathaniel Philbrick makes the American Revolution feel like a story ripped from today’s news, said Walter Isaacson in The Washington Post. In his account of the armed skirmishes that enraged pre-1776 Boston and pushed its neighbors to war, the colonies’ network of shadow governments brought to mind Facebook’s role in the Arab Spring uprisings, and 1773’s Boston Tea Party “reminded me of, well, the Tea Party.” The scene Philbrick paints is startlingly messy. “Histories of America’s birth tend to glorify the Founding Fathers,” who met in Philadelphia after the fact and yoked the revolt to a set of lofty principles. Philbrick’s “vivid narrative” focuses instead on the “passionate rebels and trigger-happy rabble-rousers” who transformed a jumble of grievances into a military conflict. He celebrates some of these men, but makes clear that they weren’t all heroes.

But boy were they shrewd propagandists, said The Economist. After 1775’s Battle of Lexington and Concord, for example, the Americans acted quickly to win sympathizers in England by deploying a schooner that delivered their version of events 12 days before the Royal Navy’s account reached London. The rebels’ military readiness was another matter, said Scott Martelle in the Los Angeles Times. Massachusetts patriots often resisted orders, swilled rum, and tarred and feathered anyone even suspected of loyalist sympathies. But the Battle of Bunker Hill, which took place on June 17, 1775, proved to be a game changer. Though the British retook two hills overlooking Cambridge that day, 1,000 British troops were killed, the rebels established the viability of their makeshift army, and a negotiated peace became implausible.

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Philbrick’s book “loses the urgency of its opening chapters” once that day’s last shot is fired, said Bob Hoover in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A grim standoff froze the action in Boston for months, and the author works to keep us engaged by providing an unflattering portrait of George Washington, the colonial forces’ novice commander. Philbrick’s true hero is Joseph Warren, a Boston doctor and rebel leader who died on Bunker Hill. His suggestion that Boston might have suffered less had Warren survived is “wishful speculation, not serious history,” but it’s a small flaw in an “otherwise realistic corrective to the conventional version of the nation’s struggle to be born.” The author “puts a human face” on the unruly throng “who managed, for better or worse, to write the first chapters of the story of the United States.”