Great deal

I've praised Ferling before, for his Almost a Miracle, but if I may broaden that a bit…  In an age when both political parties have sought to reframe history to their own ends, it is the mark of a useful, educated person to have some sense of what actually happened.

Ferling and David Hackett Fischer (Paul Revere's Ride, and many others) are the two academic historians who I think have done the best service in this. Both men write superb, fact-filled books about the American experience, or, in the case of Fischer's Champlain's Dream the pre-American experience (in this vein see also Calloway's eye-opening The Scratch of a Pen).

In 2010 Ferling wrote an interesting and well-reviewed book called Independence:  The Struggle to Set America Free, which detailed the complex and (he stresses) not necessarily inevitable descent of Anglo-American relations from discontent to confrontation, and then on to war.  It's excellent.

I raise this because it's $3.03 on Kindle today.

Pay the money.  Read the book.  Be a better American.