Seven days in June

No one has written more passionately and vividly about the American Revolution than Howard Fast. The author's eight novels that take our fight for freedom as their theme include such classics as Citizen Tom Paine, April Morning, and The Hessian. In Seven Days in June he brings to life the Battle of Bunker Hill so the reader feels that he is actually there and is experiencing the story for the first time. This novel portrays both the American and British points of view of the battle for the control of Boston in June 1775, whose outcome would dramatically influence the strategies of George Washington and Sir William Howe for the rest of the war. Fast offers acid-etched portraits of the four British generals: Howe, John Burgoyne, Thomas Gage, and Henry Clinton, as well as their wives and paramours. He also evokes, in an unforgettable way, the American revolutionaries: Israel Putnam, William Prescott, Artemus Ward, Dr. Joseph Warren, Richard Gridley, and others. . The central figure and hero is the fictional character Dr. Evan Feversham, a surgeon who ministered to the wounded in three horrific European wars and who fled England to America where he sought freedom. Most dramatic of all is the battle for Breed's and Bunker hills. A couple of hundred American men and boys are ensconced behind a hastily built redoubt. They fight in the fashion they learned from the American Indians, facing three thousand soldiers of the mightiest army on earth as the enemy begins his ascent up the steep hills that lead to the ragtag rebel army. The British soldiers are led by the grenadiers who, in lines of 32 men, one hundred feet wide, with bayonets fixed, appear like veritable giants. With their great bearskin shakos atop their heads, they were close to seven feet tall, their packs and blanket rolls making them even more menacing. Leading the advance were the tiny drummer boys, all children, in keeping with the British conviction that age did not put any loyal subject of the Crown out of harm's way. . What follows is one of the bloodiest battles of the American Revolution. There, for a moment in time, the American rebels turned back Europe's best-trained soldiers before they were forced to flee. A gripping story of betrayal and courage, cowardice and heroism, Seven Days in June inspires a feeling of pride in our origins as a nation. It is certain to become a classic.