Rating: 
Summary: How the Dutch helped the 'rebels'
Review: I was looking for a high-level, unbiased look at the Revolutionary War. What I came away with was a look at the Dutch culture, their motivations at the time of the conflict and how they made it possible for the colonies to get the supplies they needed to continue the struggle. I do think Ms. Tuchman did an EXCELLENT job on telling her story. She uses alot of references to letters and dispatches, explains the words that might not be understood, and there's a very smooth flow to the words and ideas. Very refreshing.
Rating: 
Summary: Finally, the Real Revolutionary War
Review: I'd like to say that Barbara Tuchman saved her best for last, and in many respects, she did. However there will be many out there who will not appreciate the slow build-up of The First Salute. Like a sailing schooner waiting for a breeze before finally being able to move, Ms. Tuchman's account of the American Revolution mirrors her main subjects - the French fleet, and that of the Englisman Sir George Brydges Rodney. More than once were they all stuck somewhere in their ships waiting (seemingly forever) for a wind so they could get underway. I felt like this book was waiting to get "under sail" too, mainly at the beginning. But I think you will find that not only is the wait worth it, but once you finish the book, you will realize just how brilliant the author really was in chosing this method to effectively drive home her points by clever use of point of view - Despite what Disney would have us belive, the Americans didn't rally to fighting or winning this war. Congress was as slow, and often made as little sense then as it seems to do from time to time now - Washington was a miracle worker for somehow keeping an army on the field at all. The American Revolution was won by French and Dutch money, and mainly the French military (yes it was fought by many brave Americans too, but there was too much apathy, too much self-interest, and there were too few in number to ever WIN it). Through the story of Rodney, the reader is given a unique perspective from which to witness the incredible mismanagement of the war by the British, insight into those self-destructive practices and entrenched egos that characterized monarchy, and just how close this war was to being lost and how easily it could have turned out differently. Tuchman also does not miss the chance to remind everyone just how far we still have to go to live up to those principles for which the war was supposedly fought - The end of her Epilogue will knock your socks off. All in all, another treasure from Barbara Tuchman.
Rating: 
Summary: Classic Tuchman. A Wide-ranging Look at the Revolution
Review: Opinions seem to be split on this book, with some readers praising it and others offering, well, not so much praise. I'm a Tuchman fan, so my opinion may not be entirely unbiased, but I thoroughly enjoyed The First Salute. And I can, and will, confidently recommend it to other Tuchman fans. As for the rest of you, I don't think you'll be disappointed if you decide to give it a whirl, but to make up you're mind, let me tell you a little more. First of all, don't read First Salute if you're looking for a detailed account of Revolutionary events on land or on sea. To use a metaphor from my college days, if this were a history course, it would be a 100 level survey class, not a 300 or 400 level class. That caveat aside, First Salute is an easy and enjoyable read. True, it may not keep you on the edge of your seat as other reviewers have said, but it will hold your interest. Tuchman, with her usual wit, provides an outstanding overview of the revolution. And despite the generality, Tuchman does shine the spotlight on characters and events that have been overshadowed by more powerful, dynamic people and events. For instance, the book's title comes from the first official recognition of American sovereignty by the Dutch outpost on St. Eustatius, which fired its guns in salute of an American naval ship flying revolutionary colors. Tuchman does a wonderful job of telling this and other stories, and most history buffs as well as the majority of Tuchman fans will not be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Tuchman. A Wide-ranging Look at the Revolution
Review: Opinions seem to be split on this book, with some readers praising it and others offering, well, not so much praise. I'm a Tuchman fan, so my opinion may not be entirely unbiased, but I thoroughly enjoyed The First Salute. And I can, and will, confidently recommend it to other Tuchman fans. As for the rest of you, I don't think you'll be disappointed if you decide to give it a whirl, but to make up you're mind, let me tell you a little more. First of all, don't read First Salute if you're looking for a detailed account of Revolutionary events on land or on sea. To use a metaphor from my college days, if this were a history course, it would be a 100 level survey class, not a 300 or 400 level class. That caveat aside, First Salute is an easy and enjoyable read. True, it may not keep you on the edge of your seat as other reviewers have said, but it will hold your interest. Tuchman, with her usual wit, provides an outstanding overview of the revolution. And despite the generality, Tuchman does shine the spotlight on characters and events that have been overshadowed by more powerful, dynamic people and events. For instance, the book's title comes from the first official recognition of American sovereignty by the Dutch outpost on St. Eustatius, which fired its guns in salute of an American naval ship flying revolutionary colors. Tuchman does a wonderful job of telling this and other stories, and most history buffs as well as the majority of Tuchman fans will not be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: How a small country is great
Review: Reading this book was very interesting. Not many people read their own history interpreted by a foreigner. This book gives a very nice insight in the Dutch history and should be a must for everyone interested in de creation of the US of A and European history around that time. I'm not a historian but very much interested in history itself. The only I regret after reading this book was the fact that Barbara W. Tuchman didn't write my college history books, it would have been much more interesting.
JLA vd Reijden
Rating:
Summary: The First Salute
Review: Some of the greatest works of history are those that ask the simplest questions. In The First Salute Barbara Tuchman asks one of the most obvious of questions: How did England manage to lose the Revolutionary War? To answer the question, Tuchman leads us through a welter of 17th & 18th century European history. By the end of the book we find Britain's loss, paradoxically, both inevitable and avoidable.
The `first salute' was given by the Dutch owned West Indian port of St. Eustatius on November 16, 1776 in response to a salute given by the American brigantine Andrew Doria. It was a momentous moment, the first formal recognition of American as an independent nation.
Our esteem for the brave merchants of Holland is sorely tested by an early digression to explore Holland's confused and confusing diplomatic and political history. In the bibliography Tuchman refers to it as a "Dutch excursion," but "Dutch shanghai" would work just as well. Rather than leave it at "the Dutch had a history of war with Britain" and "their confused form of Republic government didn't help things" Tuchman devotes about forty pages to the Dutch, to their relations with their European neighbors, and to their confounded political system. Decisions like this are death to narrative histories, and Tuchman's wit and skill just barely redeems it.
For instance, that pithy wit takes this swipe at William III, duke of Orange, who "died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not."
In due course Holland's overt and covert sympathetic attitude to the American rebels leads to a declaration of war by Britain. France, with an acute nose for the smell of blood in the water, throws in with the rebels. To this American reader the greatest surprise The First Salute presented was the value France and England gave to their West Indian possessions. Apparently the sugar trade was more important than the American colonies, and disrupting the enemy's trade seemed to take precedence over the war in North America.
For a good part of the narrative Tuchman follows the career of English Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney. Rodney, who is painted by Tuchman as an energetic, able seaman bordering on genius, was thwarted by many factors - a moribund navy which employed obsolete tactics and suffered "a mental lethargy that underlay the general reluctance to change old habits", a fleet that was stronger on paper than on sea, and a poisoned military environment that led Tuchman to observe "everybody hated somebody in the course of conducting the American war." Tuchman's high regard for Rodney even leads her to speculate that he might have been the decisive factor averting colonial victory had illness not prevented his absence at the endgame.
Tuchman explains French intervention in the war rather prosaically. Rather than suffering a monarchical affinity to liberty, equality, and democracy, France intervened because of a centuries old, deep seated hostility to Britain, to disrupt the sugar trade and, more immediately, to redress losses suffered in the Seven Years' War. The irony of monarchy pitted against monarchy in the cause of democracy isn't lost on Tuchman. You would think regal intuition would have identified the greater enemy, an enemy that would consume it before the century was through.
Save for the unfortunate "Dutch excursion" I enjoyed The First Salute tremendously. As an American it was at first disorienting, and then refreshing, to view the American Revolution from a European perspective.
Rating:
Summary: The First Salute
Review: Some of the greatest works of history are those that ask the simplest questions. In The First Salute Barbara Tuchman asks one of the most obvious of questions: How did England manage to lose the Revolutionary War? To answer the question, Tuchman leads us through a welter of 17th & 18th century European history. By the end of the book we find Britain's loss, paradoxically, both inevitable and avoidable.
The 'first salute' was given by the Dutch owned West Indian port of St. Eustatius on November 16, 1776 in response to a salute given by the American brigantine Andrew Doria. It was a momentous moment, the first formal recognition of American as an independent nation.
Our esteem for the brave merchants of Holland is sorely tested by an early digression to explore Holland's confused and confusing diplomatic and political history. In the bibliography Tuchman refers to it as a "Dutch excursion," but "Dutch shanghai" would work just as well. Rather than leave it at "the Dutch had a history of war with Britain" and "their confused form of Republic government didn't help things" Tuchman devotes about forty pages to the Dutch, to their relations with their European neighbors, and to their confounded political system. Decisions like this are death to narrative histories, and Tuchman's wit and skill just barely redeems it.
For instance, that pithy wit takes this swipe at William III, duke of Orange, who "died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not."
In due course Holland's overt and covert sympathetic attitude to the American rebels leads to a declaration of war by Britain. France, with an acute nose for the smell of blood in the water, throws in with the rebels. To this American reader the greatest surprise The First Salute presented was the value France and England gave to their West Indian possessions. Apparently the sugar trade was more important than the American colonies, and disrupting the enemy's trade seemed to take precedence over the war in North America.
For a good part of the narrative Tuchman follows the career of English Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney. Rodney, who is painted by Tuchman as an energetic, able seaman bordering on genius, was thwarted by many factors - a moribund navy which employed obsolete tactics and suffered "a mental lethargy that underlay the general reluctance to change old habits", a fleet that was stronger on paper than on sea, and a poisoned military environment that led Tuchman to observe "everybody hated somebody in the course of conducting the American war." Tuchman's high regard for Rodney even leads her to speculate that he might have been the decisive factor averting colonial victory had illness not prevented his absence at the endgame.
Tuchman explains French intervention in the war rather prosaically. Rather than suffering a monarchical affinity to liberty, equality, and democracy, France intervened because of a centuries old, deep seated hostility to Britain, to disrupt the sugar trade and, more immediately, to redress losses suffered in the Seven Years' War. The irony of monarchy pitted against monarchy in the cause of democracy isn't lost on Tuchman. You would think regal intuition would have identified the greater enemy, an enemy that would consume it before the century was through.
Save for the unfortunate "Dutch excursion" I enjoyed The First Salute tremendously. As an American it was at first disorienting, and then refreshing, to view the American Revolution from a European perspective.
Rating: 
Summary: hasty conclusions.
Review: The last Tuchman book I will read. This book is a serious page turner. Too bad that Tuchman doesn't stop at her available documentation. When she runs out of direct quotes and well documented facts, she speculates. It is a shame to see someone who is obviously such a meticulous scholar jump to such conclusions when the facts she had at hand were more than adequate. While trying and to a point succeeding to give an adequate picture of the minds of people like Generals Clinton and Cornwallis, and Admiril Rodney, Tuchman uses eighteenth facts combined with twentieth century sensibilities. The chronicals a large part of the revolutionary war, and the queat to bring an end to Britian's naval superiority in American waters. Tuchman does a wonderful job of searching through accounts of events and battles, but doesn't stop there. When she has told the facts as they are documented, she begins to speculate, perpetuating a number of myths about american social and military history that have taken a century to begin to dispel. This is inexcusable as in many cases the plain truth of the Americans fighting from behind rocks and trees from Lexington to Yorktown have been dispelled and are easy to document as she proves herself, when she provides a map of the siege at youktown laying out the lovely linear siege tactics employed by the French and Americans. She implies that Cornwallis at Yorktown was more interested in preserving some mideavil idea of honor by requesting to march out of Yorktown with his colors displayed in full parade. Her condescinding tone criticises the general sharply without bothering to examine that the military standards of the day dictate that if your defenses are breeched to the point that you can march out through them in full parade and regailia, you are essentially indefensible. If you don't march out, basically, your enemy will march in the same way. Cornwallis wished to prove and document for all time that he was indefensible. Tuchman robs this sad historical figure of this consideration and ridicules him for it. One of the problems I find with historians when it comes to the Rev. War is that without making a study of military history, they make a habit of forming conclusions, which First Salute does repeatedly.
Rating:
Summary: Made me curious
Review: This book gave my an insight in the dutch involvement in the american revolution. After reading it I picked up other books on the american and the dutch revolutions, how they compare and how they differ and how the dutch revolution influenced the dutch reaction to the american revoltion. On top of that I found it a pleasant book to read.
Rating:
Summary: good, but not her best
Review: This book is interesting and informative, but much more as a collection of curious trivia than as a coherent history of the Revolution. What Ms. Tuchman covers about European politics during the war years may well indeed be more topical and important than our textbooks would suggest-- but it is presented in an almost chaotic fashion that only obscures her main points. This book will not give you any sort of contextual, continuous, and sensible account of the events of the war from any point of view. Read it as a general-interest Tuchman specimen _after_ being converted by the splendid "Guns of August" and "Proud Tower".
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