His Excellency: George Washington

Nationwide Bestseller

To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd evaluation, and lyric prose which have made him one of many premier historians of the Revolutionary period. Coaching his lens on a determine who typically appears as distant as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a navy and political chief and a person whose “statue-like solidity” hid volcanic energies and feelings.

Right here is the impetuous younger officer whose miraculous survival in fight half-convinced him that he couldn’t be killed. Right here is the free-spending landowner whose money owed to English retailers instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial energy. We see the final who misplaced extra battles than he gained and the reluctant president who tried to drift above the partisan feuding of his cupboard. His Excellency is an impressive work, indispensable to an understanding not solely of its topic but additionally of the nation he introduced into being.