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WORK TITLE: The Ride
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 332
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PERSONAL
Born July 1, 1969, in Philadelphia, PA; son of Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Kathrin Perutz; married; wife’s name Amy; children: Maya, Sonya.
EDUCATION:State University of New York at Stony Brook, B.S, 1990; Columbia University, M.S., 1992.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and educator. Newsday, Melville, NY, staff writer, 1989-91, 1992; Queens Tribune, New York, NY, news editor, 1993-94; Sports Illustrated, New York senior editor, 1994—; Premium Publishing, editor-in-chief; Newsday, staff writer. Has taught at Columbia University, New York, and New York University.
AVOCATIONS:Bass guitar.
AWARDS:Fellowship, Pulitzer Foundation. Best Baseball Book of the Year, CASEY Award, 2011, for 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports; Best Baseball Book of the Year, CASEY Award, 2014, for Pete Rose: An American Dilemma; Best Baseball Book of the Year, CASEY Award, 2022, for True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the New York Times and the New Yorker.
SIDELIGHTS
Sports Illustrated senior editor Kostya Kennedy is a near-lifetime New Yorker, raised on Long Island. Perhaps that explains his decision to write about one of the greatest feats ever performed by a New York-based athlete. In 2011, Kennedy released 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports, which walks readers through New York Yankees center fielder Joe DiMaggio’s record-breaking hitting streak in the summer of 1941. Typically, Kennedy, who previously wrote for and edited sections for Newsday and the Queens Tribune, covers the National Hockey League and edits the “Scorecard” section for Sports Illustrated. Kennedy has also contributed to the New Yorker and the New York Times, and he has taught as an adjunct in the journalism programs at Columbia University and New York University.
In interviews about his research for 56, Kennedy has said he was intrigued by DiMaggio’s record not only for its impressiveness then, but also because it was achieved in the summer of 1941, which many people called “the last free summer” before the United States became involved in World War II. The atmosphere in the country was tense, and focus on DiMaggio’s streak reached a fever pitch, turning him from a solid, respected twenty-six-year-old player into a baseball superstar. Additionally, unlike many records that have been shattered more recently by players now suspected of performance-enhancing drug use, no player has come close to touching DiMaggio’s record. The second-longest hitting streak is forty games.
To research the book, Kennedy talked with DiMaggio’s brother Dominick, himself a player for the rival Red Sox team, and DiMaggio’s son. In the book, he recreates the atmosphere in the country at the time: the Nazis were already invading several European countries, while the Japanese were threatening countries in the Pacific, including the United States. The future was uncertain for young men across the country who did not know whether they would be going to war or not. Throughout the summer, from the first hit on May 15 through his first hitless game in Cleveland on July 17, DiMaggio also struggled with uncertainty and how to handle his newfound fame. On the one hand, he craved being the best ballplayer he could be; on the other, he seemed intensely shy and private. Complicating this was the fact that at the time, with Italy a part of the scorned Axis powers, being an Italian American could easily provoke antipathy from the American public. Even newspapers sometimes referred to DiMaggio by the pejorative nickname “the Wallopin’ Wop.” Kennedy wrote the book from multiple perspectives to illustrate how the streak impacted not only DiMaggio but also his personal life with his first wife, his best friend, fellow Yankees player Lefty Gomes, young Yankees fans, and the team itself. In the end, Kennedy speculates that perhaps DiMaggio’s fifty-six game streak may never be broken and identifies the professional baseball players today closest to the goal.
“I enjoyed it more for reading about the country’s atmosphere in 1941 than the details of the hitting streak,” stated Fred Hudson in a review for the blog We Are Literate. Describing the book as a “superb mix of sports and social history” in a review for Booklist, Alan Moores commented: “Sports Illustrated senior editor Kennedy restores the streak to its natural milieu.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews said that “Kennedy creates a dynamic portrait of the young star as he tried to keep the streak alive” and concluded that the book is “a fine baseball book and an expert social history.”
In Pete Rose: An American Dilemma, Kennedy offers an updated profile of baseball great Pete Rose. The player’s childhood and career are fully addressed, and Kennedy writes that Rose was a dedicated player who practiced constantly. However, he was also prone to partying and bad decisions. One such bad decision, gambling on his own games, led to Rose’s banishment from baseball, including being barred from induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Through interviews with people who knew Rose, Kennedy presents a multifaceted view of the player. Kennedy refrains from asserting whether or not his punishment fits the crime, but he does point out similar transgressions in American sports, and he notes that Rose’s punishment was far more severe.
Discussing his inspiration to write the book in an online interview for the Barnes and Noble Review, Kennedy told Mark J. Miller: “Spending a day with Rose a few years ago at one of his extended autograph sessions in Las Vegas made a real impression. There was something unresolved about him, and something unresolved as well in the way people (customers) interacted with him. This wasn’t clean or simple, the way an encounter often is when a fan meets an athlete. Seeing this made me realize that the Rose story, the layers of it, offered a real chance to explore.” He added: “Rose himself is different now; his story has taken new turns and there is clearly new context, a changed landscape. Today’s ethics around sports, and baseball in particular, have been shaped in part by the Steroid Era. All in all Rose, here in his evensong, provided rich character and rich story with which to work. And in many ways the things that define him—the ideal of the way that he played and the seriousness of his sin as a gambler, are more trenchant now than ever.”
Several reviewers agreed with this sentiment, and Wall Street Journal correspondent Craig Fehrman remarked: “Even readers who do know who Mr. Rose is will learn much from Kostya Kennedy’s Pete Rose. … But something else emerges from this book’s stacked roster of interviews and anecdotes. Half of the sources present Mr. Rose as everything that’s right with baseball—a player whose hustle and grit propped up his meager physical talents. The other half believe him to be everything that’s wrong—a coarse and arrogant star who earned his ban from the sport (and its hall of fame) by betting on games, including ones he managed.” Edward Achorn, writing in the Weekly Standard, praised the biography, stating: “With his eye for detail, Kennedy also introduces some classic Pete Rose moments from his post-baseball career: So greedy is he for cash that he is willing to autograph copies of Major League Baseball’s official report on his gambling—something that, I admit, made me laugh and feel a kind of fondness for the fallen hero.” According to Boston Globe writer Allen Barra, Kennedy “brings Rose’s story up to date, laying out the cases for and against him better than any previous account. Looking at Rose as a player, Kennedy presents an air-tight case for his worthiness in the Hall of Fame.”
In Lasting Impact: One Team, One Season: What Happens When Our Sons Play Football, published in 2016, Kennedy focuses on football in the schools. With so much evidence coming to light about the dangers football poses to the brain, Kennedy weighs the popularity of the game in schools—especially in the Midwest—against the negative health benefits.
Booklist reviewer Alan Moores was impressed with the direction Kennedy took in the book, writing: “It’s obvious Kennedy logged the hours chasing the story, but he lets it unwind as it will, playing no favorites.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote: “What happens to an educational institution when you celebrate one student activity—a nonacademic one—so enthusiastically? … Kennedy ably lays out the issues and raises the questions but offers no answers.”
In the Lincoln Journal Star Online, J. Kemper Campbell commented: “Should parents discourage young athletes from participating in a violent sport which exacts a significant toll on their bodies and minds in later years? Should they advocate abolishing interscholastic competition in football? … Kennedy has no definitive answer to these questions but does raise salient evidence in this excellent book to support either point of view.” A reviewer on the Guy Who Reviews Sports Books website observed: “Kennedy captures the spirit, the drive and the passion these young men have for the game of football and the school. No matter the level of interest one has in the sport, this is a fascinating book on the game and the young men who play it.”
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Kennedy returned to the subject of baseball and particularly its iconic figures with True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson. This unusual biography focuses on four pivotal years in Robinson’s life. The first is 1946, the year before he broke the color barrier, then 1949 when he won the Most Valuable Player Award. The third focuses on 1956, his anticlimactic last year as a professional, and then 1972, when he died at the age of fifty-three. Kennedy uses interviews with family, fans, and players as well as access to other details that have not appeared in biographies before. The goal is to shed new light on how Robinson approached baseball and life.
A reviewer in Publishers Weekly praised the book for its writing, describing it as “lyrical throughout,” and especially for its tone that “radiates with reverence.” They insisted that “baseball fans shouldn’t miss this.” A contributor in Kirkus Reviews wrote, “It’s always good to be reminded of [Robinson’s] greatness and significance.” They particularly appreciated Kennedy’s discussion of the racism that Robinson faced even after succeeding at the highest level. Gus Palas, in Library Journal, called the book “fantastic” and “captivating.” Palas too strongly recommended the book for “fans of baseball.”
Kennedy’s next nonfiction outing left sports altogether and went back to the birth of the United States. The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America was released to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride, and the book provides a background on Revere, including his commitment to the American Revolution. It also probes how much of the legend behind Revere’s ride is true, noting that Revere was hardly the only rider that night. Still, being a celebration of Revere’s ride, the book highlights what made Revere distinctive and describes certain parts of the ride as a vivid narrative.
“A skillful separation of truth, legend, and what lies between in a canonical American story,” wrote a contributor in Kirkus Reviews. They particularly enjoyed the “fascinating” digressions Kennedy includes, such as a theory of who first divulged that the British were coming, and they described the book’s big set pieces as “suitably dramatic.” The result is “engaging reading overall.” In Booklist, John Rowen praised the book as well, praising Kennedy’s writing for its “wit and insight.” Rowen appreciated how the book “greatly expands our knowledge and understanding” of what happened that fateful night, particularly the “vividly realized historical context.” A writer in Publishers Weekly called the book “amusing and affectionate,” and they wrote that it “makes for a fresh and up-close look at revolutionary Boston.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2011, Alan Moores, review of 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports; March 1, 2014, Wes Lukowsky, review of Pete Rose: An American Dilemma, p. 12; September 1, 2016, Alan Moores, review of Lasting Impact: One Team, One Season: What Happens When Our Sons Play Football, p. 37; February, 2025, John Rowen, review of The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America, p. 21.
Boston Globe, March 11, 2014, Allen Barra, review of Pete Rose.
Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2014, Erik Spanberg, review of Pete Rose.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2011, review of 56; February 1, 2014, review of Pete Rose; June 15, 2016, review of Lasting Impact; February 1, 2022, review of True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson; February 1, 2025, review of The Ride.
Library Journal, February 15, 2014, “Diamonds and the Rough,” p. 108; March, 2022, Gus Palas, review of True, p. 141.
New York, March 16, 2011, Joe DeLessio, “Kostya Kennedy on Joe DiMaggio’s 56-Game Hitting Streak and Baseball in the Summer of 1941.”
Publishers Weekly, January 20, 2014, review of Pete Rose, p. 43; January 10, 2022, review of True, p. 47; January 27, 2025, review of The Ride, p. 71.
Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2014, Craig Fehrman, review of Pete Rose.
Weekly Standard, April 21, 2014, Edward Achorn, review of Pete Rose.
ONLINE
Barnes and Noble Review, http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/ (March 18, 2014), Mark J. Miller, author interview.
Bleacher Report, http://bleacherreport.com/ (July 16, 2011), Dmitriy Ioselevich, “MLB 2011 Exclusive: Interview with SI Editor Kostya Kennedy, Author of 56.”
Guy Who Reviews Sports Books, http://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/ (September 13, 2016), review of Lasting Impact.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (October 9, 2011), author profile.
Kostya Kennedy website, http://www.kostyakennedy.com (September 10, 2025).
Lincoln Journal Star Online, http://journalstar.com/ (November 21, 2016), J. Kemper Campbell, review of Lasting Impact.
Pinstripe Alley, http://www.pinstripealley.com/ (March 17, 2011), “Interview with the Author: Kostya Kennedy on 56.”
Rothmans Man Blog, http://www.rothmansny.com/ (June 10, 2011), Ken Giddon, “One of New York’s Greatest: Kostya Kennedy on Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports.”
Sports Illustrated Website, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/ (October 9, 2011), author profile.
We Are Literate, http://weareliterate.blogspot.com/ (July 17, 2011), Fred Hudson, review of 56.*
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kostya Kennedy is an American journalist and author. He is VP and Editor in Chief of Premium Publishing at Dotdash Meredith, and a former senior writer and assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated. Kennedy has written several best-selling and critically acclaimed books. He was also a staff writer at Newsday and has contributed to The New York Times and The New Yorker among many other publications.[1][2]
Biography
Originally from Great Neck, NY, Kennedy graduated with a BA in philosophy from Stony Brook University and a BS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was awarded the distinctive Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.
Career
As VP and Editor in Chief of Premium Publishing at Dotdash Meredith, Kennedy oversees special editions across a wide range of subject areas under numerous in-house and partner brands. These include People, Time, EatingWell, Life, Entertainment Weekly, verywell, Health, Los Angeles Times, ESPN, History Channel, USA Today and many others.
A contributor and commentator on talk radio as well as on television, Kennedy has appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Morning Joe, MLB Network, NPR and other news entertainment programs. He occasionally hosts public speaking engagements focusing on issues and ethics in sports and historical and current events.[3]
At Sports Illustrated, along with writing columns, features, and cover stories, Kennedy helped found and develop several departments, including "SI Players" and "SI Adventure" and he served as the top editor of Sports Illustrated Presents, overseeing special print and digital issues devoted to the commemoration of milestones in sports.[4]
Kennedy has also been a full professor at New York University's Tisch Institute for Sports Management, Media and Business.[5] He previously taught journalism at NYU and Columbia University.
Books and awards
Kennedy's new book, The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night that Saved America will be published by St. Martin's Press on March 25, 2025. He is the author of True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson (2022, St. Martin's Press), as well as The New York Times Bestsellers Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (2014), described this way by the novelist Richard Ford: "Like the best writing about sport–Liebling, Angell–it qualifies as stirring literature" and 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (2011), which was called "the best baseball book to appear in many a season," by Roger Kahn. All three of these books received the Casey Award as the best baseball book of the year. No author has won the award more often.[6] Each was a New York Times Bestseller.[7]
External videos
video icon Q&A interview with Kennedy on True, April 10, 2022, C-SPAN
His book on Rose, along with other pieces and appearances by Kennedy, including a 2014 New York Times Op-Ed piece, have played a significant role in the renewed discussion about Rose's eligibility for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.[8]
His 2016 book Lasting Impact: One Team, One Season. What Happens When Our Sons Play Football explores the benefits and dangers of playing football in light of increased concussion awareness.
Bibliography
The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America (2025)
True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson (2022)
Winner of the Casey Award for Best Baseball Book
Lasting Impact: One Team, One Season. What Happens When Our Sons Play Football (2016)
Pete Rose: An American Dilemma (2014)
Winner of the Casey Award for Best Baseball Book
Named one of Fortune Magazine's Favorite Books of 2014
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (2011)
Winner of the Casey Award for Best Baseball Book
Runner-up PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing
Named Best Biography at the San Francisco Book Festival
Editor
The Story of Baseball in 100 Photographs (2018)
Sports Illustrated’s Super Bowl Gold: 50 Years of the Big Game (2015)
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit: 50 Years of Beautiful (2013)
Sports Illustrated’s The Hockey Book (2010)
Kostya Kennedy is Editor in Chief of Premium Publishing at People Inc., overseeing special editions under People, LIFE, TIME, Verywell, Real Simple, EatingWell, Health, Investopedia, and other brands. The editions embrace a range of topics including pop culture, health and wellness, food, lifestyle, music, sports and pets. He is a former assistant managing editor and senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He has been a staff writer at Newsday and has written for numerous outlets including The New York Times, Time, FiveThirtyEight.com and The New Yorker.
Along with 2025’s The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night the Saved America, Kennedy is the author of True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson the New York Times bestsellers 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports, and Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. All three of those books received the CASEY Award as Best Baseball Book of its respective year. Kennedy’s 2016 book Lasting Impact: One Team, One Season. What Happens When Our Sons Play Football followed a season of high school football.
Kennedy earned an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, from which he received a Pulitzer Fellowship. He has taught in the graduate journalism program at Columbia and taught at NYU, in the journalism department, and at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute of Global Sport.
His television work includes appearances as a contributing analyst and commentator on the MLB Network, as well as appearances on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Morning Joe, and numerous other television and radio programs. Kennedy edited Sports Illustrated’s The Story of Baseball in 100 Photographs, Super Bowl Gold: 50 Years of the Big Game, The Hockey Book, and Swimsuit: 50 Years of Beautiful.
Kennedy grew up on Long Island, where he lived in a house, which he wrote about here. Before Columbia, he graduated with honors as a philosophy major from Stony Brook University where he competed in exactly one game of the school’s rogue bloodsport, pit hockey. Kennedy also played bass guitar as a founding member of the specialty band Rychyrd Prychyrd. He lives with his family in New York.
True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson
Kostya Kennedy. St. Martin's, $29.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-250-27404-5
Journalisr Kennedy (Lasting Impact), a former Sports Illustrated editor, takes an idiosyncratic and heartfelt look at the enduring legacy of sports pioneer Jackie Robinson through tour seminal chapters of his life. Beginning wirh the spring of 1946, Kennedy reports on Robinson's time in the minor leagues as a member of the Montreal Royals. There, the field became a stage for Robinson's athletic gifts--including his uniquely rigid batting stance, which, Kennedy writes, "may have been the most notable and influential of them all." After joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 as the first Black man to play in Major League Baseball, Robinson delivered on the promise of his rookie year by being named the league's MVP in the summer of 1949. The fall of 1956 saw Robinson's career end on a down note: he struck out in his final at-bat for the Dodgers, ending the World Series against the Yankees. With the winter of 1972 came the retirement of Robinson's number, 42, and his death from a heart attack. Lyrical throughout, Kennedy's narrative radiates with reverence and ends on a resonant note with his description of Robinson's funeral procession in Harlem: "[People] gathered thick along the sidewalks.... There was a time in many of [their] lives when Jackie Robinson carried the brightest light of hope." Baseball fans shouldn't miss this. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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"True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 2, 10 Jan. 2022, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A690146779/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7dcc8047. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
Kennedy, Kostya TRUE St. Martin's (NonFiction None) $29.99 4, 12 ISBN: 978-1-250-27404-5
An appreciative biography of Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) and his role in the integration of Major League Baseball.
When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962, notes Kennedy, editorial director at Meredith and a former Sports Illustrated senior writer, Robinson "asked that his plaque make no mention of his role in integrating baseball." The diffidence is curious, since Robinson famously faced court-martial while serving in the Army for refusing to vacate a bus seat reserved for Whites--10 years before Rosa Parks--and had been an active supporter of and fundraiser for the civil rights movement. Indeed, as the author shows, Robinson was a first in many ways--especially as the first Black player to work in MLB in the 20th century, by the design of executive Branch Rickey, who believed that the time had come for the sport to show the rest of American society the way to treat all citizens equally. Regrettably, as Kennedy writes, the lessons were hard-won. Robinson may have been an equal on the field, but when the Brooklyn Dodgers traveled, Robinson often dined alone in his hotel room, discouraged or forbidden from entering Whites-only dining areas. Even in the supposed racial haven of Canada, where Robinson played while being groomed in the minor leagues, he encountered the "clear marginalization of Black Montrealers, the small-in-numbers populace who lived for the most part in particular areas of town, who stayed only in particular hotels or rooming houses, who found jobs in labor and service." Robinson didn't go out of his way to make waves, nor did his friend and fellow Black player Roy Campanella, who insisted, "I'm no crusader." Yet, in his quiet determination, Robinson opened numerous doors. There's not much new in Kennedy's life of Robinson, but it's always good to be reminded of his greatness and significance in any big-picture view of modern America.
A sturdy combination of sportswriting and social history.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Kennedy, Kostya: TRUE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A690892243/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=928d8b7e. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
SPORTS & RECREATION
Kennedy, Kostya. True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson. St. Martin's. Apr. 2022. 288p. ISBN 9781250274045. $29.99. SPORTS
American baseball has seen some truly legendary players. While they all left their mark on the sport, few had the impact that Jackie Robinson did on the game and on society. Robinson's impact transcended baseball because he broke the color barrier in 1947. Even now, 75 years after his first at bat, Robinson's importance cannot be overstated. In this latest work, Kennedy (56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports) has written an unconventional biography of the baseball legend. The author writes about the four most important years of Robinson's life, spanning the time from Branch Rickey's signing him to the Brooklyn Dodgers to the athlete's final years as a second baseman--all while Robinson endured racism from fellow athletes, opposing teams, and baseball fans. Kennedy notes that Robinson was not only an incredible baseball player but also an outstanding person who endured much throughout his life and career and paved the way for so many athletes today. The inclusion of occasional photographs and illustrations is a bonus. VERDICT A fantastic, well-written biography; fans of baseball and of Robinson's career (on or off the field) must read this captivating book.--Gus Palas
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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"True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson." Library Journal, vol. 147, no. 3, Mar. 2022, p. 141. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A696081848/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eaae5b8c. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America
Kostya Kennedy. St. Martin's, $29 (304p)
ISBN 978-1-250-34137-2
Paul Revere's famous 1775 late-night journey to warn American colonists about approaching British forces was far from his first such ride, emphasizes bestselling biographer Kennedy (True) in this amusing and affectionate recounting of Revere's activist years before the revolution. Kennedy presents Revere as essentially a laborer of the revolution, writing that "Revere was not born into money. He received no high-shelf education. He spent less time pondering. He worked." Revere came into contact with the revolution's early architects--John and Samuel Adams and John Hancock--through Boston high society, first as a prominent member of the Masons (prominent because he simply showed up to more meetings than anyone else, Kennedy suggests), and later in his capacity as a silversmith (but a bad one, leaving him ever in arrears). The passionate, cashstrapped, and notably athletic Revere was thus well positioned to help the revolution with such arduous physical tasks as couriering messages, including a dozen or so rides predating the most famous one. Kennedy, whose previous biographies have all been of athletes, charmingly depicts Revere as somewhat of a jock among nerds (his riding prowess is much dissected), but he pads the narrative with unnecessarily detailed descriptions of routes and out-of-left-field pivots to pop science writers like Malcolm Gladwell. Still, it makes for a fresh and up-close look at revolutionary Boston. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 4, 27 Jan. 2025, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300275/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3a1f1e3. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
Kennedy, Kostya THE RIDE St. Martin's (NonFiction None) $29.00 3, 25 ISBN: 9781250341372
A brisk trot through Paul Revere's famous ride and the many traces of history surrounding it.
That April night in 1775 wasn't Paul Revere's first ride nor his last. But, observes Kennedy, shifting from his sportswriting beat to history, it was central to both Revere's legend and the American Revolution: If the British had successfully marched, surprised their foe, fulfilled their aim of seizing the Massachusetts rebels' store of gunpowder and ammunition, and seized Samuel Adams and other leaders, the colonies might still be British today. It's emblematic of the tightness of the colonial world that British commander Thomas Gage and Continental commander George Washington fought the French together--and that Revere was right there beside them. (Daniel Boone was on hand, too.) It's also the case that the Revolution was really a civil war. Kennedy ably illuminates the background while also carefully examining Revere's legend against documented reality: the fact, for instance, that 40-odd riders spread the word alongside Revere, figuring not a bit in the received wisdom but there all the same. Still, Kennedy adds, "It was Revere, booted and spurred, who raised the resistance, who helped to deliver the first, fateful stand." Revere, as Kennedy shows, was a man of parts: an engraver whose views of the Boston Massacre were instrumental in raising that resistance, a horseman, an entrepreneur, a metalsmith, even a dentist who could hold his own against the colonial elite "while never having to suffer the indignity of being so privileged himself." Kennedy's side notes are fascinating, including the conjecture that the person who revealed the planned British march on Lexington and Concord in the first place was none other than Gage's wife. The set pieces--including Revere's arrest by British officers--are suitably dramatic as well, and the book makes for engaging reading overall.
A skillful separation of truth, legend, and what lies between in a canonical American story.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Kennedy, Kostya: THE RIDE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A825128279/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dec14c50. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.
& The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America. By Kostya Kennedy. Mar. 2025. 304p. illus. St. Martin's, $29 (9781250341372); e-book (9781250341389). 973.
Kennedy presents a richly detailed, congenial, and dryly humorous account of Paul Revere's 1775 ride to Lexington and Concord and his legacy. Kennedy clears away sound bites and sentimentality shrouding Revere to present a fully formed account of the prosperous silversmith and patriot's life. Revere's legendary ride was actually his ninth; his longest was to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. As Kennedy chronicles Revere's world, he profiles such fellow revolutionaries as John Hancock and Sam Adams and their British opponents, including Thomas Gage, and discusses the roles of women and enslaved people. A map is provided not only of the route Revere took but also that of compatriot William Dawes. Kennedy so vividly describes their heroic rides, readers will feel that they are galloping along with them. Both evaded British sentries and patrols; Revere had to slip past a Royal Navy frigate while crossing the Charles River to start his ride. The length of the rides in the dark on rough, rain-soaked roads while avoiding British patrols taxed Revere and Dawes physically and mentally. Writing throughout with wit and insight, Kennedy greatly expands our knowledge and understanding of Revere's famous ride, placing it in a vividly realized historical context. The perfect read to mark the 250th anniversary of this foundational act.--John Rowen
YA/S: Kennedy's account of Revere's youth will help teen readers understand what their lives may have been like in colonial times. JR.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Rowen, John. "The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 11-12, Feb. 2025, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A846924623/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7ed8d58b. Accessed 23 Aug. 2025.