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EW review: '1776' is history lite

McCullough's page-turner leaves out philosophical context

By Jennifer Reese
Entertainment Weekly


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David McCullough
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(Entertainment Weekly) -- Palatable, digestible and uncharacteristically bite-size, David McCullough's new page-turner, "1776," arrives just in time for Father's Day.

Though the title suggests a wide-angle portrait of that crucial year, McCullough has once again zeroed in on a single heroic figure.

Like his Pulitzer-winning "Truman and John Adams," the 294-page "1776" celebrates the manly rectitude embodied by an American president, in this case the Father of Our Country. But I cannot tell a lie: Though there is nary a dull moment in this breezy book, "1776" amounts to a deeply unsatisfying account of both a fascinating man and a pivotal historical moment.

McCullough has chosen a year that resonates with our national psyche but brought the 43-year-old George Washington mostly misery. With his usual eye for colorful primary source quotations, McCullough evokes both the stature of his patrician hero (''There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side,'' one Philadelphian wrote) and the army he had been given to lead. As a British observer reported, ''They desert in large bodies, are sickly, filthy, divided, and unruly.''

Washington did not disagree. A rich Virginian who loved fox hunting, architecture and theater (particularly Joseph Addison's tragedy "Cato"), he found the New Englanders under his command ''exceedingly dirty and nasty.'' They drank too much and ran off to dig clams at any chance. But Washington's cardinal strength, McCullough asserts, was ''an acceptance of mankind and circumstances as they were, not as he wished them to be.''

He was also, to use one of our current president's favorite adjectives, ''resolute.'' As Washington wrote in a letter, ''Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.''

Actually, in the absence of sufficient manpower and gunpowder, neither perseverance nor spirit did any wonders for Washington in the crucial battles of 1776. On July 2, the Continental Congress voted to ''dissolve the connection with Great Britain,'' and eight weeks later the redcoats drove Washington's army off New York's Long Island. McCullough's verdict: ''Washington had proven indecisive and inept: He and his general officers had not only failed; they had been made to look like fools.''

Three months later, Washington suffered another bitter defeat at Fort Washington, New York. Only in the last days of 1776, in a surprise attack, did Washington tentatively redeem his reputation and what he called his young country's ''glorious Cause.'' It is here, with the better part of a decade of war still ahead, that McCullough ends this engaging but fatally attenuated account.

Like the late, lamented Barbara Tuchman, McCullough has been unfairly criticized for glossing over ideas in favor of a seamless narrative and vivid characterizations. In fact, McCullough's finest books, like his 1981 portrait of the young Theodore Roosevelt, "Mornings on Horseback," are gems of cultural history, every bit as informative as they are fluidly written.

With "1776," sadly, the accusation of ''history lite'' hits the mark. McCullough dispatches the Declaration of Independence in two pages, and it's a mystery what, say, Thomas Jefferson might be up to.

You can polish off this volume without the slightest grasp of the glorious Cause that motivated Washington to slog through sleet and mud for eight brutal years. McCullough has crafted a deliciously readable book that leaves you famished for philosophical context.

EW Grade: B-

'Sinatra: The Life,' Anthony Summers, Robbyn Swan

Reviewed by Chris Willman

Sinatra aficionados know all about compartmentalization: There's the unrepentant hothead lothario and the greatest pop singer of the 20th century, and these two figures overlap in our imagination only to the extent that a little of that anger and libido romanticizes the lovely woundedness of his best records.

But perhaps it is possible to learn too much, as we do in this, "Sinatra: The Life," by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, the most definitive Sinatra bio to date, an absorbingly comprehensive -- if curiously matter-of-fact -- catalog of his triumphs and bottomless, alcohol-fueled rages.

Maybe it was the alleged rape in 1969, the further documentation of lifelong Mob ties, the misogynistic verbal bullying or the countless pummelings, but by the time a powerful casino boss reacts to Sinatra's threats by punching out his front teeth in chapter 30, I was almost rooting for that comeuppance.

Eventually I'll enjoy "Swing Easy" again; right now, I need one less for the road.

EW Grade: A-

'Nasty,' Simon Doonan

Reviewed by Whitney Pastorek

In between dressing the windows at Barneys New York and working as a VH1 talking head, Simon Doonan has found time to write a truly hilarious memoir that only occasionally dips into self-indulgence in "Nasty."

There are moments when, seriously, you will full-on spit out your soup, mostly involving his cracked family -- schizophrenic granny Narg, hopeless style-victim mom Betty, amateur-winemaker dad Terry -- and their happily impoverished escapades in gray industrial England.

But more than simply telling how it was, Doonan also paints a gilded, crested, feathered, sequined and altogether over-the-top picture of how it came to be that this tiny, confused British child -- whose only dream in life was to become one of ''the Beautiful People'' -- managed to achieve his goal.

EW Grade: A-

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