The real war will never get in the books, Walt Whitman once lamented. If that was true of the Civil War, how much more true would it be of the even more distant Revolutionary War? Apparently recognizing those odds, in this historical novel, Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen have tried mightily to give 21st-century readers a visceral sense of an 18th-century struggle. To Try Men's Souls renders the fight for American freedom through the lives of three men: General George Washington, masterful pamphleteer Thomas Paine, and Jonathan Van Dorn, a lowly private in Washington's army. Thus, this book presents the struggle as it was experienced by three very different men who shared nothing but the dangers the war thrust upon them. A solid addition to Gingrich's well-researched series of novels about American wars.