The essay provides a glowing review of John Ferling's book "Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence". It praises Ferling's ability to bring history to life through compelling characters and detail. The reviewer highlights how Ferling uses short passages to introduce obscure historical figures like British Captain William Evelyn, making the reader feel personally invested. While focusing on British characters, Ferling also depicts Americans and provides accurate historical context. The reviewer concludes that Ferling demonstrates mastery as both a scholar and storyteller, and recommends the book as the best single-volume history of the American Revolution.

1. American Military University
Opinion Essay #3
Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence
by
John Ferling
Essay by
Nathanael Miller
HIST 551
The American Revolution in Context
Dr. Anne Venson

2. This essay is a very ironic joy for me to write because it is such an unexpected
bookend to my first experience with John Ferling’s writing. The four years that elapsed
between his publication of A Leap in the Dark and Almost a Miracle seemed to be the
“magic time” needed for him to hone his ability to write a comprehensive history in a
popular, engaging style.
In other words, I loved this book!
Almost a Miracle is, quite simply, the best single-volume history of the American
Revolution I have ever read. Ferling is clearly a master historian and allows no small
detail to escape his eye. Yet he has also escaped the burden of academic stuffiness and
his writing is fast-paced, varied, and interesting. To refer back to my roller-coaster
metaphor from my review of A Leap in the Dark, this book is a terrific roller-coaster.
There are plethora of short sentences and paragraphs to keep the narrative’s quick step
marching on, and yet he knows right when to pause in order to build tension to the next
“sharp turn” the tracks will take while giving a deeper window into the lives and times of
the men and women who created this story.
Ferling already possessed the ability to make us feel like we know the characters
in his books. But he expands that ability to really bring us into contact with characters no
one has ever heard of before. The proverbial “little guy” suddenly becomes a player with
as much at stake in the narrative as the greats. Until reading this book, I’d wager real
“Monopoly” money no American (and very few British) ever heard of British Capt.
William Glanville Evelyn. He was such a minor figure in the larger context of the actions
in New York that history has largely forgotten him.

3. John Ferling didn’t forget him.
Ferling has researched this tale so thoroughly that he even has published a portrait
of this handsome, young, obscure British army captain. Evelyn is the first character we
meet in this book about the American Revolution. Not an American (though we are
introduced to a “Col. Glover” of the militia forces soon after), but a British soldier.
Ferling, however, does not merely leave Evelyn as a name. We get to know the man.
“He believed in this war, thought it had to be, embraced it, and looked forward to combat
with a zeal that many would find strange, even repugnant.”1
What a personality portrait emerges in that one sentence! A young man, virile,
eager, ready to fight for his king and protect his empire snaps off the page. Evelyn is
presented to us as a soldier whose life is soldiering and whose cause is his king’s. He is
shown as having already gotten past the psychological barrier that he was fighting fellow
Englishmen; no, he is fighting an enemy. But in the first seven pages we also see him
grow and mature, recognizing the fighting skills the Americans are bringing to the fight
and coming to respect them.
When Evelyn dies on page 11, I found myself genuinely moved. He was a good
man and an interesting character. Britain lost something when they lost him.
Ferling pulls all this off in only 11 pages. Almost a Miracle weighs in at over 560
pages of narrative. Not one of those pages fails to deliver on the promise of an epic tale
of war and peace offered by Ferling in the first 11 pages.
1
John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence. (New York, Oxford
University Press, 2007), 5.

4. Ferling demonstrates his talent for using a humorous turn of phrase throughout the
book to describe his characters. How much more human could he have made Lord North
than by quoting an anonymous contemporary critic of North who described the lord as a
“great, heavy booby-looking man.”2
I was on the beach fishing with my best friend when
I read that passage, and I laughed so hard it took me ten minutes to calm down enough to
read my buddy that paragraph. He’s no historian, but even he laughed and asked me to
go on reading.
Ferling doesn’t leave us merely laughing at a hapless Lord North. He goes on to
highlight the qualities that made North a great politician and a generally good man. He
lets us get to know North as a man who never held political grudges. Ferling shows us
North as a man who preferred a soft touch in Parliament, and was usually pretty
successful at it. He introduces us to a Lord North who was unswervingly loyal to his
king, but would have been a better peacetime prime minster than war minister. In all, the
North we get to know is a sad figure, loyally trying to do an impossible task for a king
who is bound and determined to subdue his contumacious colonial subjects.
I have focused my essay, such as it is, on the British because I know the
Americans pretty well. But Ferling does not limit himself to characters. He has the day-
to-day minutia of this 18th
century world down solid. For instance, I live in Suffolk, Va.
Until I read Almost a Miracle, I had no idea Suffolk was torched in 1779! The entire
town was burned by Clinton during a series of raids designed to undermine Continental
2
John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence. (New York, Oxford
University Press, 2007), 25.

5. moral. The tale of Suffolk’s loss is pretty much a footnote in the overall campaign, but it
is part of the story.
If I had to recommend a single book to anyone who was only mildly interested in
the American Revolution, hands down it would be Almost a Miracle. The book is big,
but the narrative is epic, the characterizations breathtaking, and scholarship unmatched.
Ferling showed me he was a great scholar with A Leap in the Dark. Almost a Miracle is
his claim to also be a master storyteller.

6. Bibliography
Ferling, John, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence.
New York, Oxford University Press: 2007.