Stan Mack's Real Life American Revolution

Longtime Village Voice cartoonist Mack has taken his talent for rendering the frenzied variety of life in New York City and produced a cheerful and informative history of the American Revolution. Delightfully illustrated in his distinctive minimalist cartoon style, Mack's first original book-length effort puts the ``real life'' back into our revolutionary roots, providing capsule portraits of the prominent activists of the time, along with their many idiosyncracies, comic flaws and strategic bungling. He provides amusing sketches of early anti-British activists like James Otis and Sam Adams, notes the nature of the Enlightenment and New England Puritanism and outlines the many hated tax laws that preceded the Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War. Just as important, he depicts the ongoing clashes between the colonial aristocracy, new merchant classes, urban laborers and farmers over the country's developing economy. He also profiles the important but restricted roles of African slaves and freemen and women in the war, as well as the formidable presence of Native American nations. Ending with the ratification of the Constitution, Mack celebrates the document while pointing to its flaws-the continuance of slavery, destruction of native cultures and lack of rights for women and whites without property. (Nov.)