"Leckie is a gifted writer with the ability to explain complicated military matters in layperson's terms, while sustaining the drama involved in a life-and-death struggle. His portraits of the key players in that struggle... are seamlessly interwoven with his exciting narrative.

With his celebrated sense of drama and eye for colorful detail, acclaimed military historian Robert Leckie charts the long, fierce conflict between England and France in their quest for supremacy in pre-Revolutionary America. Packed with profiles of all the major players -- including George Washington, Samuel de Champlain, William Pitt, Edward Braddock, Count Frontenac, James Wolfe, Thomas Gage, and the nobly vanquished Marquis de Montcalm -- this book chronicles the great colonial wars and the decisive French and Indian Wars (the Seven Years War). Leckie shows not only how the New World came to be such a fiercely contested prize in Western Civilization, but why we speak English today instead of French -- and reminds us how easily things might have gone the other way.