This is not necessarily a book I would have picked up on my own - the title makes it seem like it would be a patriotic recounting of the Tea Party and it's role in the American Revolution, but since I work on Boston's Freedom Trail, I felt obliged to give the book a go, and I'm so glad I did! It was a lot meatier than I expected. I particularly enjoyed the first half of this book, which focuses on the life of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a lowly shoemaker who gets caught up in the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, and the tarring and feathering of a prominent loyalist, John Malcolm. I didn't know much about the lives of poor Bostonians in the colonial/Revolutionary war era, and this book filled in a lot for me about what a poor white man's prospects looked like in the late 1700's.

The second half of the book lost me a bit, I have to admit. It explores the acceptance of the term "Tea Party" (as opposed to the way the event was initially described, as "the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor") and the way that various political groups, especially the conservative upper crust of Boston, attempted to use the Tea Party to further their political agendas. It's all very interesting, but I didn't know enough about the politics of the early 19th century to really understand which group wanted what. Even so, it's interesting to see how some things stay the same, and I liked the contemporary explorations of the Tea Party as an event that has been accepted and championed by both the left and the right in American politics (but how I wish the author had written an updated afterward in the early 2010's, and discussed the politically conservative Tea Party's appropriation of the Boston Tea Party event... alas, we must all draw our own conclusions from here).