USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Kenneth C. Davis

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Back in the early 1960s, when I was growing up, there was a silly pop song called What Did Washington Say When He Crossed the Delaware? Sung to a tarantella beat, the answer was something like "Martha, Martha, there'll be no pizza tonight." Of course, these lyrics were absurd; everybody knew Washington only ate cherry pie. On that December night in 1776, George may have told himself that if this raid on an enemy camp in Trenton, New Jersey, didn't work, he might be ordering a last meal before the British strung him up. But as the general rallied his ragged, barefoot troops across the icy Delaware, one of his actual com- ments was far more amusing than those lyrics. Stepping into his boat, Washington--the plainspoken frontiersman, not the marbleized demigod--nudged 280-pound General Henry "Ox" Knox with the tip of his boot and said, "Shift that fat ass, Harry. But slowly, or you'll swamp the damned boat.”

According to A. J. Langguth's fascinating history of the Revolution, Patriots, that is how Knox himself reported the story after the war. I certainly never heard that version of the crossing when I was in school. And that's too bad….”

NY. Avon. 1995. 489p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Nathaniel Philbrick.

FROM THE COVER FLAP: “How did America begin? This simple question launches acclaimed author Nathaniel Philbrick on an extraordinary journey to understand the truth behind our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement ofPlymouth Colony. As Philbrick reveals in this electrifying new book, the story of the Pilgrims does not end with the First Thanksgiving; instead, it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic and heroic, and still carries meaning for us today.

The account begins in the cold and dripping confines of the Mayflower, where 102 passengers tensely await the conclusion of an arduous, two-month voyage. The Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for the Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups--the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating leader Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall--maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England erupted into King Philip's War, a savage conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike, and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.

NY. Viking. 2006. 479p.