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Monday, September 26, 2016

It's Monday, What are You Reading? After Yorktown


It's Monday, What are You Reading? After Yorktown:
The Final Struggle for American Independence 
by Don Glickstein




This post is the one-hundred and seventeenth entry for this meme suggested by Sheila@ One Persons Journey Through A World of Books. [Entries 22-25 in the series were posted at  the Dr. Bill Tells Ancestor Stories]


I'm enjoying reading this book on my Kindle app on my iPad mini... it is a great reminder of all the "wartime" activities that were taking place across the country in those earliest years between the Battle of Yorktown and the Constitutional Convention period of the late 1780s. It was not a quiet time, by any means. Would the new 'nation' even survive? Fascinating stuff...lots of little details... Love it! ;-)


Book Description from Amazon:

After the Humiliating Defeat at Yorktown in 1781, George III Vowed to Keep Fighting the Rebels and Their Allies Around the World, Holding a New Nation in the Balance

Although most people think the American Revolution ended with the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, it did not. The war spread around the world, and exhausted men kept fighting—from the Arctic to Arkansas, from India and Ceylon to Schenectady and South America—while others labored to achieve a final diplomatic resolution.

After Cornwallis’s unexpected loss, George III vowed revenge, while Washington planned his next campaign. Spain, which France had lured into the war, insisted there would be no peace without seizing British-held Gibraltar. Yet the war had spun out of control long before Yorktown. Native Americans and Loyalists continued joint operations against land-hungry rebel settlers from New York to the Mississippi Valley. African American slaves sought freedom with the British. Soon, Britain seized the initiative again with a decisive naval victory in the Caribbean against the Comte de Grasse, the French hero of Yorktown.

In After Yorktown: The Final Struggle for American Independence, Don Glickstein tells the engrossing story of this uncertain and violent time, from the remarkable American and French success in Virginia to the conclusion of the fighting—in India—and then to the last British soldiers leaving America more than two years after Yorktown. Readers will learn about the people—their humor, frustration, fatigue, incredulity, worries; their shock at the savage terrorism each side inflicted; and their surprise at unexpected grace and generosity. Based on an extraordinary range of primary sources, the story encompasses a fascinating cast of characters: a French captain who destroyed a British trading post, but left supplies for Indians to help them through a harsh winter, an American Loyalist releasing a captured Spanish woman in hopes that his act of kindness will result in a prisoner exchange, a Native American leader caught “between two hells” of a fickle ally and a greedy enemy, and the only general to surrender to both George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Finally, the author asks the question we face today: How do you end a war that doesn’t want to end?


Happy Reading!

Dr. Bill  ;-)


Monday, September 19, 2016

It's Monday, What are You Reading? Downfall


It's Monday, What are You Reading?
 Downfall 
by J.A. Jance



https://www.amazon.com/Downfall-Brady-Suspense-J-Jance-ebook/dp/B017R4JVOC/


This post is the one-hundred and sixteenth entry for this meme suggested by Sheila@ One Persons Journey Through A World of Books. [Entries 22-25 in the series were posted at  the Dr. Bill Tells Ancestor Stories]


This is the last of the mystery series that I am still regularly reading - Sheriff Joanna Brady of Bisbee, Arizona, and the Cochise County Sheriff. Jance still knows how to spin a great story. We always get these in hardback format!!  ;-)


Book Description from Amazon:

Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady returns in this outstanding new mystery set in the beautiful desert country of the Southwest.
With a baby on the way, sudden deaths in the family from which to recover, a re-election campaign looming, and a daughter heading off for college, Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady has her hands full when a puzzling new case hits her department, demanding every resource she has at her disposal.
Two women have fallen to their deaths from a small nearby peak, referred to by Bisbee locals as Geronimo. What’s the connection between these two women? Is this a case of murder/suicide or is it a double homicide? And if someone else is responsible, is it possible that the perpetrator may, even now, be on the hunt for another victim?



Happy Reading!

Dr. Bill  ;-)