The copy above is from the book jacket. I read the book again in July, 2020 and found it to be an odd book indeed. It begins with a history of the Dutch—because they were the first to salute the American flag. Then it spends a lot of time on British Admiral Rodney and his career. Then it repeats over and over again that the American victory depended entirely on a vast number of unlikely occurrences involving Washington's army and the French fleet all happening exactly on time. Tuchman just beat this to absolute death. Then she went on to the lethargy that possessed the British in America and finished with a brief overview of the battle of Yorktown. If there was a central theme, it seemed to be how the war affected Europe, but that certainly wasn't apparent for much of the way.