Very disappointing at first, until I realized the author was not writing a history of The War of 1812, but connected biographies of the participants. It’s a good thing, too, because the historical background is pretty miserable – a few large scale maps in the front matter (which makes it very hard to figure out what was going on around Detroit) and lots of minor but annoying factual errors (Dolley Madison is described as entertaining “by gaslight” in the White House, the Constitution is credited with a speed of “12 ½ knots per hour”, and rifles are repeatedly confused with muskets).

Fortunately, the biographies are not bad at all. Author A. J. Langguth starts out with return of Washington to Mount Vernon at the end of his second presidential term, and tracks the careers of John Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Zebulon Pike, Madison, Tecumseh, William Hull, Isaac Brock, Isaac Hull, John Armstrong, Oliver Perry, William Henry Harrison, and Dolley Madison through the war and well afterward; plus throwing in various other characters as they come up (I never realized Davey Crocket fought in the War of 1812, or that Sam Houston spent his adolescence as a Cherokee Indian brave (a telling quote from Houston is that he would never forget his days of “wandering along the bank of streams, side by side with some Indian maiden, sheltered by the deep woods, making love and reading the Iliad.” I never realized all the uses of the Iliad before.)

This would make an excellent companion to a more conventional military history; it’s one thing to read of the American collapse at Detroit but another to have the details of the characters of William Hull and Isaac Brock at hand. (Brock comes across as far and away the best general on the Canadian front, and if he hadn’t been shot down by an American rifleman at Queenston while leading his troops the war might have ended very differently; we’d all be speaking Canadian now.) ( )