Matt Damsker

Special for USA TODAY

As another American summer crawls toward the Fourth of July, and with a presidential election creeping up like Freddy on Elm Street, Nathaniel Philbrick offers some beach reading to remind us that outsized egos and a dysfunctional Congress were as much at issue in 1776 as they are now — if that’s any comfort.

Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (Viking, 326 pp., ***½ out of four stars) is a book for the moment, though it trawls so languidly in the past, when, not unlike today, the nation’s future could not have seemed less certain. The action begins in the spring of ’76, with George Washington barely controlling his troops and losing New York to the British navy, while his star general, Benedict Arnold, is saving the colonies from a British invasion on Lake Champlain.

The dense details are mastered, typically, by Philbrick, whose National Book Award-winning history, In the Heart of the Sea, gave us the story behind the story of Moby-Dick. No less a whale of a tale, Valiant Ambition colorfully reconstructs the character-driven battles that defined the Revolutionary War. As most of us know, vaguely, Washington rose from his early defeats to scuttle the British and emerge as the first paragon of American leadership, while Arnold spiraled to traitorous disgrace in the arms of the enemy. He remains the Great American Turncoat.

The real story is, of course, a more complex rendezvous with destiny. Philbrick’s impeccable research and solemn style aim for an atmospheric immersion, swaddling the reader in period specifics (did you know that pettiaugers were “two-sailed workboats equipped with leeboards instead of a keel”?). But the book’s engine revs nicely with the appearance of Arnold, a Connecticut Yankee who prospered as a New Haven merchant, patriot, and builder of “one of the finest homes in town.”

At this point in the narrative, Arnold takes on a familiar mien, “hypersensitive to any slight, and like many honor-obsessed gentlemen in the eighteenth century he had challenged more than one man to a duel.” With his “almost superhuman energy and endurance,” Arnold is quickly sketched as something of a narcissist who keeps his own counsel and has no patience for other points of view, however logical, when he’s in command of ships and the lives within.

His moment of heroism on Lake Champlain gave him considerable status at first, but as the war progressed and Congress, inevitably, vacillated in giving Washington and his generals the support they desperately sought, Arnold lost faith in the rebellion. And after a disastrous attempt at surrendering the American fort at West Point to the British, he lost his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor, though not in that order.

Philbrick’s thick-textured chronicle echoes David McCullough’s breezier history, 1776, but as a cautionary tale of character corrupted in pursuit of power, Valiant Ambition casts its scholarly spell.