The author of Unfamiliar Fishes and The Wordy Shipmates gives us another irreverent history lesson in this buoyant, insightful account of George Washington's trusted officer and friend, the swashbuckling teenage French aristocrat the Marquis de Lafayette. Sarah Vowell reflects on the ideals of the American Revolution versus the reality of the Revolutionary War, riding alongside Lafayette from the high-minded debates of Independence Hall to the frozen wasteland of Valley Forge, from bloody battlefields to the Palace of Versailles, and bumping into John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Cornwallis, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and various kings, Quakers, and redcoats along the way.