Book excerpt: On April 18, 1775, a riot over the price of flour broke out in the French city of Dijon. That night, across the Atlantic, Paul Revere mounted the fastest horse he could find and kicked it into a gallop. So began what have been called the "sister revolutions" of France and America. In a single, thrilling narrative, this book tells the story of those revolutions, and shows just how deeply intertwined they actually were. Their leaders, George Washington and the marquis de Lafayette, had a relationship every bit as complex as the long, fraught history of the French-American alliance. Vain, tough, ambitious, they strove to shape their characters and records into the form they wanted history to remember. Book jacket.