Volume 45, Number 15 · October 8, 1998
The Reluctant Republicans
By Edmund S. Morgan
The Brave Bostonians: Hutchinson, Quincy, Franklin, and the Coming of the American Revolution
by Philip McFarland
Westview, 286 pp., $25.00
The title of this beguiling study is a little misleading, taken from a sympathetic Englishman's reference to the people of Boston who defied British authority. The book itself is not about bravery in Boston. It is about a year in the lives of three people who happened to have been born there but who spent most of the year in question, from mid-1774 to mid-1775, in London. Since their lives in that year intersected only incidentally and the biographical details are pretty well known, this would seem an unlikely means for approaching 'the coming of the American Revolution.' Because it is so unlikely, Philip McFarland's success in creating a coherent and revealing narrative is a small tour de force, especially as the point of no return in the coming of the Revolution may have been reached by the time he brings his characters into view.
Review, 3117 words
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