Roger Williams is one of those figures, famous but forbidding, who hover at the periphery, imposing, important, indispensable to our history and culture and yet still distant, unknown to most Americans. John Smith, John Rolfe, Miles Standish, John Winthrop-all of these are somehow more dynamic, more human, than Roger Williams, and yet Williams may be the most significant of them all, the one whose breath gives life to modern American culture and whose fingerprints are most evident on the American constitution. The task of reviving Roger Williams has fallen happily to John M. Barry.