Count of Concord

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was—as Nicholas Delbanco writes—“world famous in his lifetime,” yet now he has been “almost wholly forgotten.” Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson—the narrator of this novel and the Count’s fictional, last-surviving relative—is “haunted” by one of history’s most fascinating and remarkable figures. On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above...