Avg. Customer Rating:(based on 71 reviews) Sales Rank: 2148 Category: Book
Author:David Liss Publisher:Random House Studio:Random House Manufacturer:Random House Label:Random House Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published) Media: Hardcover Edition: 1st Number Of Items: 1 Pages: 544 Shipping Weight (lbs): 2 Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.3
Product Description David Liss?s bestselling historical thrillers, including A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader, have been called remarkable and rousing: the perfect combination of scrupulous research and breathless excitement. Now Liss delivers his best novel yet in an entirely new setting?America in the years after the Revolution, an unstable nation where desperate schemers vie for wealth, power, and a chance to shape a country?s destiny.
Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington?s most valued spies, now lives in disgrace, haunting the taverns of Philadelphia. An accusation of treason has long since cost him his reputation and his beloved fiancee, Cynthia Pearson, but at his most desperate moment he is recruited for an unlikely task?finding Cynthia?s missing husband. To help her, Saunders must serve his old enemy, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who is engaged in a bitter power struggle with political rival Thomas Jefferson over the fragile young nation?s first real financial institution: the Bank of the United States.
Meanwhile, Joan Maycott is a young woman married to another Revolutionary War veteran. With the new states unable to support their ex-soldiers, the Maycotts make a desperate gamble: trade the chance of future payment for the hope of a better life on the western Pennsylvania frontier. There, amid hardship and deprivation, they find unlikely friendship and a chance for prosperity with a new method of distilling whiskey. But on an isolated frontier, whiskey is more than a drink; it is currency and power, and the Maycotts? success attracts the brutal attention of men in Hamilton?s orbit, men who threaten to destroy all Joan holds dear.
As their causes intertwine, Joan and Saunders?both patriots in their own way?find themselves on opposing sides of a daring scheme that will forever change their lives and their new country. The Whiskey Rebels is a superb rendering of a perilous age and a nation nearly torn apart?and David Liss?s most powerful novel yet.
Liss can do no wrong! December 4, 2008 Those of us of a certain age fondly recall John Jake's Kent Family Chronicles, a popular series of books bowing around the time of the Bicentennial which followed the adventures of an American family from the era of the Revolutionary War to the present day. As a teenager, I found these novels a reliable source of good, pulpy fun, perfect fare for someone like me who enjoyed an adventure story and didn't mind picking up some historical tidbits along the way. I suspect that's why David Liss's books resonate so deeply with me over thirty years later--in works like A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader, Liss has crafted a series of elegant and thoughtful historical novels, books which appeal to both my love of thrillers and fascination with history. As other reviewers have insightfully noted, Liss has a way of drawing you so deeply into his tales that you feel as if you've actually witnessed the events he describes and met the characters he's created. That's certainly the case with his latest, The Whiskey Rebels, which, dealing as it does with the financial tremors which shook America in its infancy, has great relevancy to current events, bearing out George Santayana's contention that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
A history mystery! December 2, 2008 This is the first novel my husband and I fought over, moving it from my desk to his and giving each other the 'look' if the other one had it at night. I'm delighted to say I devoured this wonderful novel first and can't wait to share my opinion with readers who love a great 'history mystery'. The first thing that struck me about this author was the hard boiled stage setting combined with historic fact. For example: '...I had not left my boardinghouse determined to die, now things were different.' are among the many lines that keep you wrapped up in the outcome of the two main characters; Ethan Saunders and Joan Maycott who will cross paths in a plot that might've destroyed early America. I found myself diving into the action, pondering the factual versus the fiction tangled web of the story and enjoying the humorous banter sprinkled in the witty dialogue. I'm convinced that if I don't read this author's other novels, I will truly miss out. David Liss clearly does a lot of research when writing his stories, but his true talent is creating characters so real we are certain they've walked the path he laid out for them in the story. I waited until the end of the novel to find out what was true fact and what was fiction as far as the history. I learned something about my country and the men who helped shape it as well as being entertained.
Chrissy K. McVay - Author
TWO IF BY SEA December 2, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In combining fictional characters and events of The American Revolutionary War with historical accuracy concerning the burgeoning financial institutions of the young republic , this entertaining but lumbering historical novel, try as it might, fails to develop the concepts of democracy and finance into a high adventure.
Told in two first-person narrations, in somewhat alternating chapters, The Whiskey Rebels, tells the stories of Ethan Saunders, a disgraced spy from The Revolutionary War, whose comedic narrative is certainly inspired by Melville's Ishmael, and Joan Maycott, a frontier woman whose patriotic ideals are tested when her attempts to capitalize on a whiskey making operation are oppressed by American forces of tyranny. Deep into the book, the two narrators' paths cross, igniting the novel to exciting possibilites, yet subsequent chapters barb more than mesh and there soon seems little reason for the dual narration, or the character's involvement in a plot to control the market.
Author David Liss is a wonderful descriptive writer and an excellent historian. 18th Century America comes alive like the smoky air of a young and rustic 4th of July celebration, while Ethan Saunders narration caused me to laugh out loud several times. But the suspense and intrigue regarding the American stock market, the essence of the novel, often reads like a dry financial report. Great pains are taken to explain the workings of the young financial democracy, and such stock market insight is rarely absorbed by the diminishing derring-do spirit. The biggest problem is the narratives' feeble conviction regarding a plot to pilfer the financial institutions of the day. Neither narrative, although buried in verbal reasoning, has much stake in the ground here, and both characters would be better served as seperates in a more traditional, less gimmicky historical book. As an unjustly disgraced spy, Ethan Saunders is an exciting oppurtunity that is wasted on tedious proceedings. What should have been a riveting moment of the book, Saunders meeting George Washington at the height of chaos, is a passive page-turn that does nothing to advance insight or story, and offers, at least, the wry description of Washington smelling like wool.
The read was frustrating, intriguing, enlightening, and disappointing.
For over two months I have tried to get through this book.... November 26, 2008 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
.... and I am now calling *uncle*. I love historical fiction and I've not found many novels based on this period in US history so I was very much looking forward to this book. I have lost count of the times I have picked this book up and put it down for another. Unlikeable characters, a plot that takes too long to get moving and the worst sin of all (at least for me) is the alternating chapters with the first person point of view of Ethan and Joan. Phillipa Gregory and Alison Weir got away with it, but now it's getting very very old. Two stars.
Surprising but not entirely gripping November 25, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I ordered this while high on repeat viewings of "1776" and the build-up to the elections, but when it arrived, I had to ask myself "WHAT was I thinking?" This is not my style at all. I don't care much for thrillers or mysteries, and while colonial and post-revolutionary history interests me, it's not a passion.
I must say, Liss did catch my interest immediately. His hero, Ethan Saunders, comes from a great tradition of intelligent rogues with secret sorrows. He also has created a heroine in much the same vein in Joan Maycott. Not so much of the secret sorrow there, but she's young when we meet her, and hasn't had time for many sorrows.
Given that Liss' central characters are smart, reasonably interesting characters, I'd have hoped that the narrative would live up to them. Unfortunately I wasn't as captivated by it as I had hoped I'd be. It jumps about a good deal, which is disorienting, and it's dry and often difficult to push through. It's not bad, it just requires a good deal of work, which I'm not entirely sure it rewards in the end.
I would say that for those readers who are students of the American economic model, this might prove more interesting than it did to me. The story echoes the sort of questionable business practices which inform today's headlines. Fascinating as a news story, particularly when your livelihood is at stake, but perhaps not so much in novel form. Still, for readers who are fans of this sort of novel, I suspect it will pay off handsomely.
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