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Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution. By Ira D. Gruber. (Chapel Hill: The Society of the Cincinnati and The University of North Carolina Press, 2010, Pp. xii, 325. $55.00.)
The title of Ira D. Gruber's recent book is misleading. The title, Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution, leads the reader to expect a wide-ranging study of the literary preferences of eighteenth-century British soldiers when, in reality, the book only examines books on war. Using the library inventories of forty-two well-educated, wealthy, and prominent British Army officers, collected between 1721 and 1799, Gruber's study tracks the popularity of books on military subjects. Completely ignoring books on religion, philosophy, natural sciences, and other subjects-which in most inventories...