Jays's Reviews > Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring

This is a bit of a fun conundrum - it's the story of the American spy ring put into place by George Washington written by an Englishman who (from what I can tell) lives in America. As such, it's one of my favorite ways to read history; that is, it's history told (sort of) from the losing side. I'm always more interested in how the losers tell the story of big historical events and, as an American, there isn't a much bigger event in my cultural mainstay than the American Revolution. Add to the interesting perspective the fact that the book is extremely well-researched and that the author frequently lets his obviously wry sense of humor slip into the prose and you've got a book with a good turn of phrase about an interesting topic.

That said, there's a reason for the two stars. Remember how I said well-researched? That's almost to the book's detriment. One other reviewer put it best when he/she said this was a book for which if the author had a purchase receipt as documentation to prove that a payment was made, the book was going to include the entire list of what was bought. Well I like a thorough historical accounting as much as the next guy, constantly running into long lists of letters, purchases, bills, and accounts killed the momentum of the read many times.

If you can get past that barrier, however, this is a really interesting part of early American history. Even knowing about the Culper Ring before reading this, I got such a better appreciation of what it actually looked like and how it functioned as well as an understanding of exactly how relatively amateur spies were in the western world during this period of history. The author does a very good job of putting spying into the context of a truly underhanded industry that "proper gentlemen" would think it uncivilized to engage in. He also very clearly uses that context to help the reader understand the actions, heroic and sometimes frankly kind of smarmy, of the early American and British spies. I only wish that there was more discussion of some of the other characters that other books on the subject touch on (355 for example), however given that most of those other sources are not as well researched as this, I assume the author chose not to go down that path for the sake of avoiding speculation.

Short version: Great micro-history of a relatively unknown chapter of early Americana, if a bit of a dense one. But seriously, the author's sense of humor and turn of phrase make for some great passages.