The Revolutionary

[With] exquisite, fact-based prose... Stacy Schiff has produced a delightfully enthralling and insightful account of an elusive Founding Father. A tour de force. --Mark G. Spencer, The Wall Street Journal Revelatory and frequently riveting...Throughout, Schiff vividly recounts major events in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, including the Stamp Act Crisis, the Boston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party, and draws incisive sketches of Loyalist governor Thomas Hutchinson, Patriot lawyer James Otis, and others. Fast-paced and enlightening, this is a must-read for colonial history buffs. --Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review) Step aside, Thomas Jefferson; let's talk about the man whose devotion to resistance behavior makes him, for some, the most essential figure in the American Revolution. Samuel Adams comes to electrifying life through this Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's meticulous research and dynamic storytelling as a man of principle and persuasion. There was also Adams' devotion to stealth and secrecy, which may be why it's taken so long to tease out his unusual story. --Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times A beautifully crafted, invaluable biography. . .Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future, underscoring the lessons of Adams while reclaiming our nation's self-evident truths at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten them. --Oprah Daily This is a meticulously researched and often eloquent work of historical biography... Schiff offers a welcome, fresh study featuring notions of liberty and democracy that feel particularly relevant in today's consistently tumultuous political landscape. --Kirkus Reviews PRAISE FOR CLEOPATRA: PRAISE FOR THE WITCHES: Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world. --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times [Schiff's] research is impeccable; no previous writer has scoured the documentary record to such great depth. Moreover, she has mastered the entire history of early New England--from long before to well after the year of the witch-hunt....Indeed, readers may experience her narrative as a virtual tour of the time and place....Schiff's skills as a writer extend to such formal matters as structure, pacing, and point of view...she maintains throughout the authority of an omniscient narrator who is firmly in charge. --John Demos, The New York Review of Books A masterpiece...[Schiff] has brought to life Cleopatra. --Michael Korda, The Daily Beast A work of literature. --Judith Thurman, The New Yorker An oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller: J. K. Rowling meets Antony Beevor, Stephen King, and Marina Warner... Schiff's writing is to die for. --The Times (London) As in her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Cleopatra, Schiff excels at finding fresh angles on familiar stories, carries out massive research and then weaves it into a dazzling social panorama. In Henry James's phrase from The Art of Fiction, she is a writer on whom nothing is lost....a superb account of the Terror of Salem. --Elaine Showalter, Washington Post Enthralling. --Maureen Dowd, The New York Times Every page of The Witches is almost scandalously pleasurable, the phrases rising, cresting and falling like all the best incantations. [Schiff] casts a spell on you. (4 Stars) --Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today Haunting...the first major commercial nonfiction book on the subject in decades...Ms. Schiff instead delivers an almost novelistic, thrillerlike narrative of those manic nine months. By sidestepping most of the popular theories, The Witches...stands out from much of the existing literature. --The New York Times Schiff brings to bear a sensibility as different from the Puritans' as can be imagined: gentle, ironic, broadly empathetic, with a keen eye for humor and nuance. Thanks to this, and to Schiff's narrative gifts, the present-day reader flits above New England's smoky chimneys and thatched rooftops... it is wizardry of a sort--in a flash of brimstone, a whole world made wondrously visible. --The Atlantic Schiff is one of the most formidable nonfiction writers working today. --BookRiot Stacy Schiff is that rare combination: a first-rate historian and a brilliant storyteller. Using a wide range of sources, she spins straw into gold, conjuring the world of Ptolemaic Egypt in full vibrant color, and returning the voice of one of the most powerful, fascinating, and maligned women in history. Cleopatra is impossible to put down. --Rick Riordan, author of Percy Jackson & the Olympians series Engagingly thorough, thrillingly told and bracingly authoritative.--Jean Zimmerman, NPR With incomparable wit, grace, and insight, Stacy Schiff narrates the birth of the American Revolution in Boston and the artful, elusive magician who made it all happen: Samuel Adams. For too long, Adams, hiding behind his many masks and stratagems, has evaded historians, but Schiff draws him from the shadows into the spotlight he so richly deserves. A glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important. This is a time for Americans to meditate on the fate of their republic and no better place to start than here, at the beginning, with this book. --Ron Chernow