The Whites of Their Eyes by Paul Lockhart. Non-fiction. US release June 7, 2011.
On June 17, 1775, New England colonists faced off against the British in what has become known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major clash of the American Revolution. Though it is one of the most famous battles in history, it is so clouded in patriotic myth that everything about it – the men who fought it, the commanders who led them, even the ebb and flow of the fighting – has been consistently misunderstood.
The Whites of Their Eyes dispels dearly held myths, revealing how this battle was not a heroic struggle between a band of resourceful American amateurs and a disciplined professional army of veterans led by haughty, overconfident British generals. Nor was it a clash between Old World and New, and their two very different ways of fighting war.
Historian Paul Lockhart argues that in reality, Bunker Hill was a clumsy engagement pitting one inexperienced army against another. He tells the rest of the story, too: how a mob of armed civilians became America’s first army and how George Washington put aside his comfortable patrician life to take command