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Gran Leon Books - The Whiskey Rebels: A Novel
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List Price: $26.00
Our Price: $17.16
Your Save: $ 8.84 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Random House
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400064205
ISBN: 1400064201
Label: Random House
Manufacturer: Random House
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 544
Publication Date: 2008-09-30
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: 2008-09-30
Studio: Random House
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Editorial Reviews:
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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 fiancée, 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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Historical Thriller.
Comment: I don't know why I cringe at the idea of reading a historical novel, because usually I end up loving them. Case in point, with 'The Whiskey Rebels'. The spilt narrative follows Ethan Saunders, a disgraced spy in George Washington's army, and Joan Maycott, a young idealistic woman who moves to the outskirts of Pennsylvania to start a new life with her husband, unaware of the hardships they're about to face. Their individuals paths eventually merge, but it's the journey there that's the fun part. In light of the current economic crisis, I found the book eerily timely in it's plot line around the inception of the Bank of The United States. But make no mistake, this is not a dry tome, far from it. It's a smart literary thriller, with two compelling narrators, and a myriad of plot twists to keep you guessing until it's satisfying conclusion.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting reading
Comment: I was excited to start this book because it sounded interesting. As I started the book I found I was losing interest and I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish it. However, all of a sudden it came to life and things started to make a lot of sense. You could see how everything twisted together. It ended up I could hardly put the book down and was sorry when it ended. Anyone who like a lot of twists and turns, you'll enjoy it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superbly interesting novel
Comment: I was interested in the Whiskey Rebellion period of history, so I thought I'd read a novel rather than a history book. I learned more than I bargained for! The beginnings of the American banking system, free trade in the 18th century, way more than I ever knew about Alexander Hamilton and a little I hadn't known about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Here's a novel that grabs you with the first chapter. You're not sure you like the first protagonist, but the second one is adorable. Action Action Action!
The novel is a little confusing until you get used to alternating between two seemingly different stories, but once you realize they are going to join up, things get even more exciting!
I might just read this one again soon, but I have quite a stack lined up already!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Just an average novel
Comment: With over 70 reviews already available, I will make mine short. I found Saunders to be just a bit too "cute" to suit my tastes. He reminded me of a TV series hero who, in the 5th year of the series, has mutated from a serious character into one who cracks jokes during life-or-death situations that would have most mortals in a state of terror. In short, he seemed written for the movie role to follow, not as a believable, historical character.
I also disliked the escape by a certain character near the end. I won't spoil it in case you plan to read it, but I don't think his escape was plausible.
An ok read, but I was glad it ended and it will never make a re-read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Historical fiction through a PC filter
Comment: Not long ago--certainly within the living memory of anyone approaching the age of 40--nearly every novel, movie, and television adventure show featured a white male hero. When people outside that mold appeared at all, they were invariably either victims to be rescued, sidekicks, or villains. But within the past 20 years, that paradigm has been completely turned on its head. In The Whiskey Rebels we see what happens when the postmodern cult of the anti-White male reaches its absurd climax and history must be tortured to accommodate it.
The Whiskey Rebels is a decently written novel. It is a page-turner in the worst sense of that term. That is, the author's prose is sufficiently punchy to keep you turning pages to see what happens next. Unfortunately, what usually happens next is "not much." The plot is disjointed and full of unsurprising surprise twists. The dialog is what you'd expect from a "made for HBO" type historical adventure. There are scenes that make the reader groan out loud thanks to bizarre and totally unnecessary sexual imagery.
But my real problem with this book was the characters who were little more than pawns acting out a morality play in the 21st century mode. The "hero" is Captain Saunders, a wrongfully disgraced Revolutionary War officer. About two-thirds of the book is written from his perspective and he sees himself as an exceptionally dashing and clever fellow. The reader soon discovers, however, that he is a scoundrel and a drunken boob who, unbeknownst to him, is being manipulated by the other characters in the book.
The other third of the book is told through the eyes of Joan Maycott, a brilliantly self-educated woman who moved to the Pennsylvania frontier with her husband. Though cheated and brutalized by the local aristocrat and his thugs, the Maycotts and the other hearty frontier folk find success in developing a new way to make whiskey. But the imposition of the federal tax on whiskey exacerbates tensions on the frontier and Maycott is left a widow seeking revenge on the federal reprobates and speculators who ruined her life. She and her Whiskey Boys infiltrate Philadelphia and launch a complex financial scheme to utterly destroy the creature they feel most responsible for their plight.
The other major protagonists in the book are as follows: Kyler Lavien--a kind of Jewish ninja in the employ of Alexander Hamilton who has neatly compartmentalized his idyllic family life from his day job as a spy/assassin; Leonidas--Saunder's slave who is presented as ten times the man his master is; Dalton and Richmond--two whiskey boys who the author "outs" inelegantly and then puts forth the ludicrous idea that everyone on the frontier was perfectly fine with their atypical living arrangement; and Skye, an older Scottsman and one of the whiskey boys whose main purpose in the novel is to be a rejected suitor for the widow Maycott.
The villains are all, without exception, rich white males.
So the old trope has now been completely inverted. Once you realize this, the course of events is easily predicted.
Let me just say that I find tales like this to be just as tedious and uncreative as the ones of yore in which only rich, white men could be the heroes.
A couple of the Founding Fathers pass through the pages of The Whiskey Rebels. Alexander Hamilton is presented enigmatically--of course, he is shown sneaking off to visit his mistress. George Washington appears in one scene, though the author seemed fixated upon Washington's false teeth more than anything else.
So in short, this book was a disappointment. Not exactly a yawner, but simply annoying in that the author seems to be nothing more than a politically correct trend-follower. Personally, I'm tired of those.
For those of you interested in the true history of the Pennsylvania frontier, which is infinitely more interesting than this book, I recommend the following primary sources: NORTH MOUNTAIN MEMENTOS, Wilderness Chronicles of Northwestern Pennsylvania, and Thirty Thousand Miles With John Heckewelder
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