Washington: A Life - Ron Chernow
Washington: A Life - Ron Chernow
Non-Fiction
Pages: 928
George Washington may well be the most famous American in history. Practically everyone in America sees his face every day - on walls, in books, on TV, in movies, on the one-dollar bill. Everyone knows the stories - the wooden teeth, the cherry tree, 'I cannot tell a lie', Valley Forge, the crossing of the Delaware. George Washington looms over American history like a monument - literally. He's inescapable, as much man as myth.
And yet there is very little life to his myth. Most of the legends that have grown up around him are patently untrue - the aforementioned cherry tree and the wooden dentures just two examples. George Washington is as massive and ever-present as his monument in the city that bears his name and about as human. There is no personality to his myth. He stares out from his portraits as impassive and inscrutable as stone. So tackling a biography of George Washington is no mean feat. Many have tried - he is, after all, the Father of his nation, the Founding Father of Founding Fathers, the one without whom perhaps none of it, not the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the War, the Constitution, the Presidency, would have happened.
Happily this biography by Ron Chernow more than does him justice. The George Washington in these pages comes alive - a young man ambitious, impulsive and eager for glory; a soldier jealous of his rank and reputation and embittered at an Empire that had no respect for colonial troops; a Revolutionary general who doubted his ability to succeed in such an enterprise as the Revolutionary War; a man consistently reluctant to assume the burdens of power and leadership thrust upon him; a childless husband who adopted his wife's children as his own, and many more besides, who constantly struggled with debt yet tried to maintain the image of a Virginia gentleman; a slaveholder who professed to abhor slavery; and a man who at various point held more power in his hands than anyone alive on earth at the time and repeatedly and deliberately gave it up after his duty was done.
George Washington is perhaps a difficult man to like - even to those who knew and loved and admired him he maintained a certain amount of distance, and even in his own day there were those who found it difficult to penetrate the mask to reach the man beneath. But it is almost impossible not to admire him, and to wonder how different the course of history might have been had he not apparently been protected by the hand of what he called Providence.
Non-Fiction
Pages: 928
George Washington may well be the most famous American in history. Practically everyone in America sees his face every day - on walls, in books, on TV, in movies, on the one-dollar bill. Everyone knows the stories - the wooden teeth, the cherry tree, 'I cannot tell a lie', Valley Forge, the crossing of the Delaware. George Washington looms over American history like a monument - literally. He's inescapable, as much man as myth.
And yet there is very little life to his myth. Most of the legends that have grown up around him are patently untrue - the aforementioned cherry tree and the wooden dentures just two examples. George Washington is as massive and ever-present as his monument in the city that bears his name and about as human. There is no personality to his myth. He stares out from his portraits as impassive and inscrutable as stone. So tackling a biography of George Washington is no mean feat. Many have tried - he is, after all, the Father of his nation, the Founding Father of Founding Fathers, the one without whom perhaps none of it, not the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the War, the Constitution, the Presidency, would have happened.
Happily this biography by Ron Chernow more than does him justice. The George Washington in these pages comes alive - a young man ambitious, impulsive and eager for glory; a soldier jealous of his rank and reputation and embittered at an Empire that had no respect for colonial troops; a Revolutionary general who doubted his ability to succeed in such an enterprise as the Revolutionary War; a man consistently reluctant to assume the burdens of power and leadership thrust upon him; a childless husband who adopted his wife's children as his own, and many more besides, who constantly struggled with debt yet tried to maintain the image of a Virginia gentleman; a slaveholder who professed to abhor slavery; and a man who at various point held more power in his hands than anyone alive on earth at the time and repeatedly and deliberately gave it up after his duty was done.
George Washington is perhaps a difficult man to like - even to those who knew and loved and admired him he maintained a certain amount of distance, and even in his own day there were those who found it difficult to penetrate the mask to reach the man beneath. But it is almost impossible not to admire him, and to wonder how different the course of history might have been had he not apparently been protected by the hand of what he called Providence.