Rick Atkinson

Hey, welcome back to 7-Minute Books.

I'm Sam, and today we're digging into the fate of the day by Rick Atkinson, which is basically two centuries of American warfare in one sweeping book.

So Sophie, I have to ask you off the top, what does the title actually mean here?

Hey there, Sam.

So when you write a book, do you write it in longhand or you write it on computers?

The only thing I write out in longhand, you know, one of my best friends is Rick Atkinson, whose outlines are longer than his books.

I mean, it's stunning.

He is so incredibly organized.

you you had i was going back to you and lv was your undergrad in history because that was yeah history so uh what did do you follow any authors history wise My favorite

is probably Rick Atkinson.

He's really good.

He wrote An Army at Dawn.

The war comes along, and it turns out he's got an incredible talent for warfighting.

And leading men in the dark of night, as my friend Rick Atkinson would say.

You know, so he's a hero, basically, early on at Fort Ticonderoga with Ethan Allen.

They take that critical fort on the upstate chain of lakes.

But I would just warn anybody that our wars with Canada have never gone as well as we thought they would.

And they did burn our capital.

So we need to be careful with our good friends from North.

Now, when we look at the date, July 4th of 1776, so we're celebrating our 250 year.

It was only when Lieutenant Colonel Smith arrived and had his drum or sound assembly that command was finally restored.

The writer Rick Atkinson would say, Lexington had not been a battle or even a skirmish, but an execution.

In the aftermath, eight rebels were dead, another nine wounded.

The British had two privates with minor wounds and Pickharn's horse was grazed twice on the side.

These were the people who were gonna run things.

The most important thing, um, I think with regard to the Founders, and our writer, Jeff Ward, who I've worked with for, uh, 45 years, said it really beautifully the other day.

He said, "If we see those Founders as perfect, then they're untouchable, because we know deeply how flawed we are, and that we presume in their perfection that we can't ever equal them." So our job as artists and as storytellers is to try to remind us of the humanity.

George Washington is the indispensable human being in this, but he owns 577 other human beings.

As the writer Rick Atkinson said, "You can't square that circle, and you cannot." He makes really lousy tactical decisions in the battlefield, and loses the biggest battle in size of the Revolution at Long Island, uh, not protecting his left flank.

Does the same thing a few months later at Brandywine, not protecting his right flank.

You know, there's problems.

Sounded like us.

They again moved slowly, not arriving until the 29th.

Regarding the French fleet's arrival off the coast of Rhode Island, Rick Atkinson writes, quote, At 9 a.m. the ocean fog lifted to reveal a dozen ships of the line, four frigates and several smaller escorts standing in for Narragansett Bay.

And this is a quote within the quote.

This is what an eyewitness said.

The last full book that I've read.

The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson.

He's a great historian.

I'm a history nerd.