Review: "Lafayette and the American Revolution," Freedman

By Paul Carrier

Books written for young people can sometimes be as rewarding as, and more fun than, those geared toward an adult readership. That’s true even if you happen to be - chronologically speaking, anyway - a grown-up. 

So it is with Russell Freedman’s Lafayette and the American Revolution. 

At 88 pages, this is not an exhaustive look at the life of the French nobleman who embraced the American Revolution, shed his blood for the cause and came to be viewed by George Washington as an adopted son. 

But Freedman offers a thorough overview of the Marquis de Lafayette’s eventful life before, during and (to a lesser extent) after the Revolutionary War, when he returned to France and played a pivotal role in the early stages of the French Revolution. 

The straightforward text is accompanied by numerous illustrations that make the book pleasing to the eye and all the more readable. Freedman clearly appreciates the value of a telling anecdote, as well as the importance of making his subject compelling to young readers. 

In fact, Lafayette’s youth - he arrived in America at 19 and became the youngest general in the Continental Army - will help kids relate to his early awkwardness, and appreciate his later exploits. 

We learn, for example, that before he set sail for America, the boyish Lafayette was laughed at by Marie Antoinette when the clumsy teenager bumbled his way through a dance with the French queen at the royal court.

Later, when Lafayette had to call off a planned American invasion of Canada for lack of troops and supplies, he sounded like a humiliated teenager. “Men will have the right to laugh at me,” he said in a letter to the president of the Continental Congress. 

In an accessible and engaging style, Freedman opens his account by describing Lafayette’s secretive plan to sail to America with other French volunteers in 1777, over the objections of his family and his king. The author then examines Lafayette’s youth, marriage and ambitions; his Atlantic crossing; his first meeting with Washington; and his early military accomplishments during the Revolution. 

Lafayette returned to France in 1779 to secure French aid for the American rebels, and he sailed back to America with the news that a large French force was on its way. He went on to play a key role in the decisive Battle of Yorktown, which ended with the surrender of Lord Cornwallis and his army to a combined American-French force. 

Freedman is no stranger to writing nonfiction for kids. In fact, that is his claim to fame. A former journalist and publicist, he is the award-winning author of more than 40 books, including Lincoln: a Photobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery, and The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane. 

As Kirkus Reviews put it: “Freedman knows how to distill a lively and focused story from a swamp of information on a much-studied subject, writing with an acute eye for fascinating detail and significant facts,” making him “a master of his craft.”