Revolutionary Characters

Wood examines the motivations, personalities, foibles, and integrity of the Founding Fathers, and how those factors bore on the creation of our nation. This temperate, informed, and informative, albeit long-winded, volume responds to revisionist historians, who have over-humanized the men who created the United States. The work benefits from the skill of narrator Scott Brick, whose intelligence and expressiveness absorbingly reflect the meat and message of even the stuffiest passages. His Shakespearean experience adds sonority and grace to a text that, on paper, often lacks both. He and his producers are a bit careless with names, as when he pronounces "Strahan," a friend of Franklin, two ways, both wrong. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine