This is an exceptional book, beautifully written. Very few serious books on colonial American history have prose that is quite so accessible and vibrant. O'Toole has blended fresh archival history with a narrative style that has sinuous pace as well as compelling variety and excitement of tone. In fact, all the old clichés about history being brought to life apply to this, the second of O'Toole's three-book series on individuals involved with the creation of modern mythologies (his previous subject was Richard Brinsley Sheridan). O'Toole's subject here is “White Savage” William Johnson, the superintendent for Indian affairs for the colony of New York from 1755 until his death in 1774, a man who was a master of strategic adaptation, who transformed himself from colonized Irish Catholic to Protestant colonial soldier and, if O'Toole is to be believed, to spiritually dominant sachem within the Iroquois confederacy.

It is this book's wholesale immersion in the complexities of Johnson's life that give it its terrific strength. O'Toole's concern is to unpick the myriad strands that make up the dominant American mythology and to show us how Irishmen like Johnson negotiated life at the interstice of various circles of power. He portrays Johnson as emblematic of the Irish, a people who were first colonized but who in turn became colonizers, who were deemed “savage” in Ireland but who saw themselves as harbingers of civilization in America. Such a trajectory inevitably breeds understanding, an awareness of colonialism as a globally unfolding process rather than as a historically bounded event. It means Johnson cannot be dismissed as a brute imperialist and, by extension, that the colonizing process cannot be seen in black-and-white terms. Instead Johnson is revealed as man adroit at capturing and utilizing correspondences and reciprocities between and across cultures, a man with an intelligent and spiritual awareness of how productive exchange can be fostered and developed. He was as at ease ritually condoling Iroquois death as he once was keening for the deaths of his own Irish people, since both colonized peoples used the same spiritual and ceremonial forces to stave off what is the worst aspect of cultural engulfment and potential extinction, the deep and abiding paralysis that stems from profound sorrow. He understood that exchange within Iroquois society was as much about ritual as it was about profit. Having grown up near Tara, the ancient Irish seat of kings, he also understood the Iroquois's mythic and sacred relationship with landscape and the power held by inanimate things such as water and stone.

It may be the case that, perhaps forgivably, O'Toole overplays Johnson's role within Iroquois society, as, for example, when he uses quotes to suggest that Johnson “was the principle Tie that keeps the 6 Nations together” (162), but at the same time he never shies away from the great truth about the Irish as colonialists. “The wounded pride of the Irish dispossessed,” he admits, “often found a salve in the joy of dominating others” (294). So often a good story well told does not make good history. Immediacy can bring with it inaccuracy and the balance and objectivity that is so central to historical practice can be lost. This is not the case here. One can only hope that this most talented and inspiring of writers will maintain his interest in the construction of things American and give us more of the same.