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NOW WE ARE ENEMIES by Thomas J. Fleming Kirkus Star

NOW WE ARE ENEMIES

By

Publisher: St Martin's Press

Lacking both romantic adventures and glamorous heroines, this fine first novel by an executive editor of Cosmopolitan, a Literary Guild selection for October, recreates through the eyes of its actual participants the first major engagement of the American Revolution, the battle of Breed's or Bunker Hill, fought on a blazing June day in 1775. Like the vivid non-fictional account of the battle of Lexington and Concord in Tourtellot's William Diamond's Drum, this book shaters myth and catches the very smell of a war in its beginnings. Retreating to Boston after their defeat at Concord in the spring of 1775, the British were planning to seize Charleston, across the bay, only to be surprised by the Americans, who on June 16 themselves fortified Breed's or Bunker Hill, behind Charlestown and overlooking Boston and its harbor. Attacking the next day in blistering heat, after hours of bravery and horror on both sides, the British forced the Americans to withdraw, a technical defeat which turned a smouldering war into a real one. Here in this book the men fighting the battle come alive: the British generals, Howe and Gage and Clinton, with their minor officers and servants; the Americans, many of them friends of men who, after this day, were their enemies: Israel Putnam, John Stark with his New Hampshire soldiers, John Warren and many others, all out of history and all very real as they appear here. Their story is handled with restraint and humor and excitement and its fictional form should not diminish its interest for those who enjoy authentic historical material.