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  • Published: 18 May 2017
  • ISBN: 9780143110194
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

Valiant Ambition

George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution



From the New York Times bestselling historian comes a surprising account of the messy middle years of the Revolution and the tragic relationship of George Washington and Benedict Arnold.

A New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the George Washington Prize

A surprising account of the middle years of the American Revolution and the tragic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold, from the New York Times bestselling author of In The Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, and In the Hurricane's Eye.

"May be one of the greatest what-if books of the age—a volume that turns one of America’s best-known narratives on its head.”—Boston Globe

"Clear and insightful, [Valiant Ambition] consolidates Philbrick's reputation as one of America's foremost practitioners of narrative nonfiction."Wall Street Journal

In the second book of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick turns to the tragic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. In September 1776, the vulnerable Continental army under an unsure George Washington evacuated New York after a devastating defeat by the British army. Three weeks later, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeded in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have lost the war. As this book ends, four years later Washington has vanquished his demons, and Arnold has fled to the enemy. America was forced at last to realize that the real threat to its liberties might not come from without but from withinComplex, controversial, and dramatic, Valiant Ambition is a portrait of a people in crisis and the war that gave birth to a nation.

  • Published: 18 May 2017
  • ISBN: 9780143110194
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

About the author

Nathaniel Philbrick

Nathaniel Philbrick is an historian and broadcaster whose books include In the Heart of the Sea, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and won America's National Book Award (and is director Ron Howard's major new film), Sea of Glory (winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize), Mayflower, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the Sunday Times bestselling The Last Stand.
He lives on Nantucket Island and is the founding director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies and a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association.

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