Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's War for Independence, by Jack Kelly

Rachel Lodi has written to notify us of an upcoming book, BAND OF GIANTS: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence by Jack Kelly, which comes out September 9^th. Jack is a journalist, novelist, and historian who has written for places like American Heritage and American Legacy, and has appeared on The History Channel.

The book delves into the peculiar backgrounds of the generals, officers and soldiers who won America’s independence in the Revolutionary War. Far from the career officers and ROTC recruits in today’s military, most of these men were inexperienced fighters, often learning to fire a canon from a diagram in a book the day before a battle.   Kelly details their varied backgrounds as merchants, mechanics, fisherman, farmers, and even drunkards.  He takes the reader through the war as these soldiers experienced it, facing immense odds and setback after setback.   The narrative features characters like Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, Richard Montgomery, Daniel Morgan and Anthony Wayne, detailing their often unexpected backgrounds as civilians.  Jack Kelly is local to the Hudson River Valley, where many of the pivotal Revolutionary War battles took place, and his book provides fascinating new insight into the conditions of the war, and the men who actually fought in it.