PositiveThe Wall Street JournalIn The Last Brahmin Mr. Nichter, a professor of history at Texas A&M University-Central Texas, presents Lodge as a man who believed he owed much to the nation, and so believed the nation should use him as it saw fit ... What Mr. Nichter does not quite explain is what led Lodge to continue this shift after the war ... While Mr. Nichter chronicles Lodge’s active role in the era, the reader still is left to wonder about the man’s ultimate motivations, and what he made of it all. \'Never tell them how you did it,\' indeed.
Christian Di Spigna
RaveThe Wall Street JournalIn Founding Martyr, Christian Di Spigna has produced a gripping biography of one of the American Revolution’s earliest activists. This is no whitewashed version of the Founding. Mr. Di Spigna’s Boston is a rough place, with violence on all sides and a growing suspicion of British rule ... Mr. Di Spigna is especially good at illuminating the importance of Warren’s association with the Masons...as well as his religious congregation and more formal groups such as the Committee of Safety, which coordinated colonial protests ... He came to the cause, Mr. Di Spigna convincingly argues, through a combination of moral conviction and personal motivation ... Founding Martyr helps restore to their proper place Joseph Warren’s important contributions to our nation’s prehistory.
