Noble Volunteers

The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution

By: Don N. Hagist

Narrated by: David Beveridge

Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Redcoats. For Americans, the word brings to mind the occupying army that attempted to crush the Revolutionary War.

In Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution, Don N. Hagist brings life to these soldiers, describing the training, experiences, and outcomes of British soldiers who fought during the Revolution. Drawing on thousands of military records and other primary sources in British, American, and Canadian archives, and the writings of dozens of officers and soldiers, Noble Volunteers shows how a peacetime army responded to the onset of war, how professional soldiers adapted quickly and effectively to become tactically dominant, and what became of the thousands of career soldiers once the war was over.

In this historical tour de force, introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson, Hagist dispels long-held myths, revealing how remarkably diverse British soldiers were. They represented a variety of ages, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and many had joined the army as a peacetime career, only to find themselves fighting a war on another continent in often brutal conditions. Against the sweeping backdrop of the war, Hagist directs his focus on the small picture, illuminating the moments in an individual soldier’s life - those hours spent nursing a fever while standing sentry in the bitter cold, or writing a letter to a wife back home. What emerges from these vignettes is the understanding that while these were “common” soldiers, each soldier was completely unique.”

The book is published by Westholme Publishing. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"Demonstrates that the Brits fought valiantly for the cause they espoused." (Washington Independent Review of Books)

"An eye-opening account of the redcoats." (Kirkus Reviews)

©2020 Don N. Hagist (P)2021 Redwood Audiobooks

botched edition at chapter 13

starting at around 6:31:20 the edition forgot to delete the multiple takes of the narrator reading the book.

you can hear the same sentences being repeated 3, 4 times, throat-cleaeing, mouse clicking (to pass the pdf pages I presume) and even the narrator misspronoubcing a word and commenting "that's not even a word..." and then trying again, which, while funny, took me completely out of focus, and I learned nothing from Chapter 13 (haven't finushed the rest of the book yet to see if it stops at any point, but the entirety of Chapter 13 is like this)

now, normally I can only rank a book over Story; Performance and Overall, none of those are Edition, so I don't quite know how to rank this other than giving a bad overall because there is at least one entire Chapter I could learn nothing from.

I'm hoping they can get the edition team to fix these parts so I can actually listen to their content. maybe keep the unedited part as a "making of" at the end of the book, but definitely fix the uncuted takes