WHERE WAS PATRICK HENRY ON THE 29TH OF MAY?

Even his friends agreed that "there was nothing special about Patrick Henry as a boy." But despite the gimmicky emphasis on the 29th of May—the day Henry's "bawling out" of King George reached treasonable proportions—this life is far from dull. In fact it conveys a sense of the great orator's character that's absent in more sedate, older biographies: a boy who always wore clean underwear beneath his shabby clothes; an eighteen-year-old whose "storekeeping was a failure, but his courting. . . a success" (he married into wealth, 300 acres and six slaves); and, finally, the popular speaker and somewhat vain landowner ("knee-deep in dogs and children") whom the brainier Jefferson described as "all tongue." Along the way Fritz introduces some memorable historical asides—one learns that Henry seems to have picked up his talent from a speechmaking uncle named Langloo Winston; and that there was a celebration after the Battle of Saratoga when one Walter Lenox "imagined he was a cannon. Boom-booming and bang-banging all night. . . ." Margot Tomes makes the most of Henry's theatrical posturing and altogether this spunky, irreverent performance captures the essence of the celebrated "Patrick flash.