The Whiskey Rebels

By: David Liss

Narrated by: Christopher Lane

Length: 18 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington's most valued spies, now lives in disgrace, haunting the taverns of Philadelphia. An accusation of treason has long since cost him his reputation and his beloved fiancée, Cynthia Pearson, but at his most desperate moment he is recruited for an unlikely task: finding Cynthia's missing husband.

To help her, Saunders must serve his old enemy, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who is engaged in a bitter power struggle with political rival Thomas Jefferson over the creation of the fragile young nation's first real financial institution: the Bank of the United States.

Meanwhile, Joan Maycott is a young woman married to another Revolutionary War veteran. With the new states unable to support their ex-soldiers, the Maycotts make a desperate gamble: trade the chance of future payment for the hope of a better life on the western Pennsylvania frontier.

There, amid hardship and deprivation, they find unlikely friendship and a chance for prosperity with a new method of distilling whiskey. But on an isolated frontier, whiskey is more than a drink; it is currency and power, and the Maycotts' success attracts the brutal attention of men in Hamilton's orbit, men who threaten to destroy all Joan holds dear.

As their causes intertwine, Joan and Saunders - both patriots in their own way - find themselves on opposing sides of a daring scheme that will forever change their lives and their new country.The Whiskey Rebels is a superb rendering of a perilous age and a nation nearly torn apart - and David Liss's most powerful novel yet.

©2008 David Liss (P)2008 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

GREAT SAGA OF AMERICAN CRUELTY IN LATE 1700's!

READ THE BOOK, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO PUT IT DOWN UNTIL COMPLETED!
Setting late 1700's with early Americans who had very little wealth, bought land in the West to set out on their dreams. Little did they know that they would be swindled on the way to their land. To their astonishment the were settlers who had already been through this terrible insult. They took them back to the original land purchased, set up a home for them and went into the whiskey business and, made a fortune with a new formula that everyone preferred. The Whiskey Riders were developed! The Whiskey Tax was also developed in an effort to break them but, it didn't work. A few untimely deaths of their swindlers and one of their major partners in the whiskey business, sent them back East a very wealthy group. This is where the major portion of the story takes place with Hamilton vs Jefferson followers trying todo battle with the Million Dollar Bank.

Fascinating bit of history that is glossed over

I enjoyed this book very much. The Whiskey Rebellion is often glossed over in history class and this book fleshes out what happened, its importance and its long-reaching consequences to the newly formed USA. You do have to stick with it a bit as the author doesn't always signal that you have stepped back in time, but as long as you pay attention, you do catch on to it. History class always makes the founding of this country sound like it was settled over a good cup of rum and some darts, so not true and this book is a good example of the growing pains that started early on in establishing the USA's economy. There is also the interesting twist on the murder of Alexander Hamilton, that I did not expect!

Interesting

Never knew about many of the historical facts in the novel. Greed of some of the first Americans interesting...their messing with debt and speculation could be taken from the headlines of today. Very sad all the swindling of hard working people and the abuse of women and children.

Narrator outstanding.

I am glad I listened to this book, but do not think I will listen to it again.

Good Historical Fiction

If you love history, adventure, and drama, this book will resonate with you. The story is fascinating. The narration is clear and compelling. I liked it a lot.

I enjoyed this book

I am excited to have found a really good historical fiction writer and plan to read more of his work.. I read this immediately after reading biography of Andrew Hamilton so it was even more enjoyable.. The story of Joan and Ethan and Cynthia kept me interested until the end.

Better than a movie

I am loving this book. I listen to it at work, because I can't wait to pick up where I left off the night before at home. Bravo. First David Liss, won't be my last.

A Great Historical Novel

If you could sum up The Whiskey Rebels in three words, what would they be?

This is a wonderful story of the late 1700s Philadelphia - after the American Revolution. Took me an hour or two of listening before I really started to enjoy the novel. The author wrote his characters with language of the time; it takes a bit of time to adapt my own listening style. Liss is a terrific author with a sly sense of humor. I am moving on to the Coffee Traders.

What did you like best about this story?

The two main characters.

good story good narrator

the story was very well done and researched and the narrator did a great job expressing each characters personalities.

Fascinating Story, History and Reader!

If you could sum up The Whiskey Rebels in three words, what would they be?

Unexpected Plot Twist

What did you like best about this story?

I had to keep listening. This story took so many twists and turns and I never could have predicted the ending. Great history ensconced in a page-turning mystery.

What about Christopher Lane’s performance did you like?

He did an incredible job. There were a plethora of characters and he had a unique voice for each one, making it simple to follow the dialogue.

Who was the most memorable character of The Whiskey Rebels and why?

Of course, Ethan Saunders. He went from someone I loved to hate, to someone that I was really routing for by the end of the story.

Alexander Hamilton, Pro/Con in a Riveting Story

Most historical novelists seem to start out as writers who get interested in history and then turn it into story. That is, I gather, the method that even the best – like Hilary Mantel – have followed. David Liss does it the other way around, though. He began as a historian – and, I believe as a historian in the potentially dry field of economic history – and then he found a way to tell stories that gave a flavor of the historical clashes and processes he came to understand.

I read his Conspiracy of Paper when it first came out more than 15 years ago, and I admired it enough that I wrote him with vague hopes that he might be looking for a job as an academic historian and would consider the place I was then teaching. As I recall, he wrote back kindly, expressing polite interest for after he’d finished his PhD, but I think he must already have glimpsed his coming career path. While this is now only my second Liss, I can see he’s been turning out quality historical fiction ever since.

This novel, at a bottom line, is an assessment of Alexander Hamilton’s footprint on American life. Like a good historian – a better one that the otherwise masterfully talented Lin-Manual Miranda – Liss sees that legacy as mixed. On the one hand, Hamilton established a system of federal credit and wealth-generation that made the subsequent American experiment possible. Without Hamilton’s bank and credit regulations, the Revolution would have withered.

On the other hand, the price of that system was that some spark of the true American rebellion got snuffed. To the degree that early America represented a Jeffersonian vision of small farmers, conquering the land and living in what we might retrospectively see as a nobler Libertarianism, Hamilton’s centralization of economic authority shifted power back to the merchant class. As characters here complain, Hamilton restored some of the inherent corruptions of capitalism that at least some American Revolutionaries understood themselves as fighting against.

Liss deals with that dichotomous view of Hamilton by creating two protagonists here. Ethan Saunders is a disgraced spy, one who feels personally let down by Hamilton but ultimately supports his aim. Joan Maycott is, in spirit, a pure Jeffersonian, a young woman who wants to write the first great American novel, and who determines to help settle Western Pennsylvania with her young husband. When Joan is fleeced by land speculators – and when even worse follows as a consequence of her being tricked – she identifies Hamiltonianism as her ultimate enemy.

The result is a novel in alternating chapters, with Ethan narrating one and then Joan the next (although there are occasional alterations in the pattern). Each protagonist sees some grey to the black-and-white character of what Hamilton represented, but the effect is that over the course of the novel we get a pro/con for Hamilton’s influence.

Remarkably, Liss never lets that feel dry or forced. In fact, it’s only in retrospect that I see what amounts to the history lessons concealed beneath the novel itself. What we have on the surface is a pair of adventure novels – ones that ultimately intersect in satisfying ways – and a pair of nicely imagined characters grappling with the New World of the American Republic.

The result is a legitimate thriller, a novel that moves quickly and that has a great deal at stake within it. I’m sure it’s possible to read this and think of Hamilton as merely an incidental figure, as simply the “client” that detective Saunders works for or the politician that rebel Maycott intends to bring down. You can read this, in other words, as a fast-paced adventure story.

I enjoyed this throughout, but there are a couple spots where Liss is not entirely deft in his narration. The alternating chapters bother me less than I imagined they would, but it did bother me toward the end when he resorted to the sleight-of-hand of not quite telling us what was going on. (For example, Ethan would declare something like, “I determined to go to the one man who could tell me what I needed to know,” leaving it hanging that he was off to see, say, Philip Freneau, for no purpose other than to sustain some narrative uncertainty.) The hardest part of the literary effort Liss set for himself was to weave the two narrative perspectives together, and the seams do end up showing even as the story comes together effectively.

As a side note, Liss continues here some of what he did in A Conspiracy of Paper where, also interrogating economic history, he explored the possibility of what we might call “tough Jews” in historical times. There, it was Daniel Mendoza, the great boxer, who becomes pressed into service as a quasi-detective. Here, it’s Hamilton’s agent Levian, a ruthless and effective spy who partners with Ethan to undertake the dirtiest aspects of their shared work.

In any case, I recommend reading this both for its history and its own energy. Liss knows what he’s doing here, and I suspect he knew what he was doing 15 years ago when he made it clear he saw a better future for himself as a novelist than as a history professor.