The remarkable thing, as Ron Chernow shows in his Washington: A Life, is that he was all these things, at different times, and sometimes even simultaneously. This, of course, is well known, and purists may wonder whether we really need another Washington biography. Strictly speaking, the answer has to be: not this one. The author brings no new evidence to bear and advances no fundamentally new interpretation. The justification for Chernow’s book lies elsewhere: in the fluency of the argument, the wisdom of the author’s judgments, and – despite its length – the tautness of the narrative, which keeps the reader engrossed from the first to the last page. Some stylistic slips and a tendency towards the homespun aside, the author writes well, and has a remarkable eye for telling anecdotes and quotations. He takes us deftly through the familiar set-pieces of Washington’s career, beginning with his struggle with his overbearing mother and the disastrous expedition against the French and Indians that nearly brought his career to a premature end in the mid-1750s. [...] Wisely, Chernow does not explicitly set out to write a biography 'for our times’. All the same, his account bears an obvious message for American readers: big government, far from being a betrayal of the Founding Fathers, is as American as pecan pie. The final chapters show that Washington was deeply concerned after independence by the weakness of the bonds holding the 13 states together.Read that review from The Telegraph, here. Additionally, WNYC Radio's Leonard Lopate Show had Chernow over, as a guest. Listen to that show, here.
See also: Alexander Hamilton
, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family
