This accomplished retelling of the Seven Years' War in North America offers hope, and cautions, to those who want professional historians to write careful history that is accessible to a larger audience who enjoy well-told historical narratives. Ideally, a compelling and nuanced story will carry a subtext of analysis and argument that is not too insistent for general readers, and yet will convince fellow-scholars that something valuable has been added to knowledge. All five reviewers here confirm what the popular press and book club adoptions suggest: Anderson has written a masterful narrative. All academic book reviews will indicate how The Crucible of War appears to experts, but there is special merit in assembling reviews by five scholars who have very different contexts, and then inviting the author to respond. John Shy is best known for his classic book on the military and the coming of the American Revolution and for another on military aspects of that conflict.(2) Gregory Dowd has published a pioneering study of Amerindian resistance to Europeans in the lifetime after 1745 and is currently working on what was once called Pontiac's War.(3) Jay Cassell has completed a book-length manuscript on the armies of New France, and Jonathan Dull has completed one on the French government and the loss of Canada. Peter Marshall is a leading scholar of the eighteenth-century British empire, specializing in British government policy and the empire in India after 1740.(4) The earlier narrators of analogous versions of the years 1754-66, Francis Parkman, Richard Waddington, and Lawrence H. Gipson each needed five volumes; Anderson has written a single hefty volume, one that was initially intended to encompass an additional thirty years. It is hardly surprising that all five reviewers want more, which is a compliment, and want more on subjects they know well. The comparatively modest additions sought by Shy and Dowd reveal the book's strengths and intended emphases, while Cassell, Dull, and Marshall want more substantial changes. Another shared reaction is that the narrative over-emphasizes contingencies, coincidences, and individuals. To some extent, this is inherent in narrative, though Anderson is deliberately countering determinism that not just historical forces but the actions, motives, and characters of individual actors could be seen to shape outcomes. The rather breathless narratives race through 74 brief chapters, starting and ending in media res, and the story is seldom interrupted by deliberate analysis. Social, economic, geographic and cultural forces enter the story only when the narrative invites subordinate clauses. One strength of Anderson's approach is that there is something very familiar and convincing about the unreflective immediacy and unpredictable contingency that mirrors the private and public worlds we all inhabit. Yet it is also possible that full and careful consideration of specific people and events severely inhibits those larger generalizations that historians defensively insist is the difference between their profession and antiquarianism. On the road to glittering generalization, how many specific people and events can we dismiss as atypical or aberrant? In disarming concessions to his reviewers, Anderson goes well beyond predictable courtesies. The honest admission that he used only English language sources is rather shocking, though historians of New France have long suspected this limitation in American colonial historians. Anderson's delineation of his as a provincial perspective, what John Shy calls a metroliner outlook, confirms what other critics contend. Anderson's remarks on the limitations and demands of the narrative are particularly intriguing and puzzling. He argues that the narrative had a will of its own, overcoming his intentions and arguments, and growing so readily that the beginning and end of the story, and much attending analysis, were all eventually pushed from the book. …