Christopher S. Wren

Walking tours through regions in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire are complemented by the author's description of ecological oddities, natural element challenges, and his rite of passage into retirement.

Assigned to cover yet another ethnic conflict, T.K. Farrow, a jaded newspaperman, finds himself competing for scoops against Cassandra Benoit, a fresh-faced Canadian schoolteacher-turned-amateur reporter who strings for public radio. Even as she challenges everything he and his hard-bitten colleagues take for granted, T.K. finds himself drawn to Cass, who is intent as much on saving humanity as on reporting the news. As Equatoria explodes into full-fledged civil war, T.K. and Cass's rocky affair is interrupted by a boozy Washington pundit, a TV anchorman with a face that launched a thousand focus groups, and a sinister guerrilla leader known as the Doctor. When the final battle sends laptop computers, television cameras, and satellite up-links crashing into darkness, T.K. must make a decision as professionally and personally daunting as any he has faced: should he rescue Cass or hang in to cover the best story of his career?

"The story of Ethan Allen and the much-loved Green Mountain Boys of Vermont and their role in the American Revolution--the myth and the reality. A rare look at a corner of the Revolutionary War. In Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom, Wren overturns the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a different portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. They were ruffians who joined the rush for cheap land on the northern frontier of the colonies in the years before the American Revolution. Allen did not serve in the Continental Army but he raced Benedict Arnold for the famous seizure of Britain's Fort Ticonderoga. Allen and Arnold loathed each other. General George Washington, leery of Allen, refused to give him troops. In a botched attempt to capture Montreal against specific orders of the commanding American general, Allen was captured in 1775 and shipped to England to be hanged. Freed in 1778, he spent the rest of his time negotiating with the British but failing to bring Vermont back under British rule. Based on original archival research, this is a groundbreaking account of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War, of George Washington (and his good sense), and of a major American myth. Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom is an important contribution to the history of the American Revolution"--