His Excellency: George Washington | Joseph J. Ellis

His Excellency: George Washington | Joseph J. Ellis | A Great Man not an Deity

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His Excellency: Ge...

	His Excellency: George Washington Joseph J. Ellis Knopf, 2004 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 220 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The author of seven highly acclaimed books, Joseph J. Ellis has crafted a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history, George Washington. With his careful attention to detail and his lyrical prose, Ellis has set a new standard for biography.

Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, Joseph Ellis paints a full portrait of George Washington?s life and career?from his military years through his two terms as president. Ellis illuminates the difficulties the first executive confronted as he worked to keep the emerging country united in the face of adversarial factions. He richly details Washington?s private life and illustrates the ways in which it influenced his public persona. Through Ellis?s artful narration, we look inside Washington?s marriage and his subsequent entrance into the upper echelons of Virginia?s plantation society. We come to understand that it was by managing his own large debts to British merchants that he experienced firsthand the imperiousness of the British Empire. And we watch the evolution of his attitude toward slavery, which led to his emancipating his own slaves in his will. Throughout, Ellis peels back the layers of myth and uncovers for us Washington in the context of eighteenth-century America, allowing us to comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishments and the character of his spirit and mind.

When Washington died in 1799, Ellis tells us, he was eulogized as ?first in the hearts of his countrymen.? Since then, however, his image has been chisled onto Mount Rushmore and printed on the dollar bill. He is on our landscape and in our wallets but not, Ellis argues, in our hearts. Ellis strips away the ivy and legend that have grown up over the Washington statue and recovers the flesh-and-blood man in all his passionate and fully human prowess.

In the pantheon of our republic?s founders, there were many outstanding individuals. And yet each of them?Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison? acknowledged Washington to be his superior, the only indispensable figure, the one and only ?His Excellency.? Both physically and politically, Washington towered over his peers for reasons this book elucidates. His Excellency is a full, glorious, and multifaceted portrait of the man behind our country?s genesis, sure to become the authoritative biography of George Washington for many decades.

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Excellent

Some have wanted to reserve 5 stars to a "War and Peace" type book. To me 5 stars means the book did what it set out to do and did it well. "His Excellency" indeed did. It is an excellent short biography of the father of our country. When I picked this book up, I realized all I knew about Washington was what I had been taught in grade school.

Ellis is an excellent biographer who delves into many aspects of Washington's life. The narrative moved well and was entertaining. Some may be put off by Ellis' style of going into analysis of issues. I found that this added to my understanding.

Washington indeed was a great man who's influence reaches us to this day. Now I know why!

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A Great Man not an Deity

Several years ago I decided to read at least one biography on every US President. Hearing a short lecture about Washington at a museum was a big catalyst for my decision. Here was a man that had transcended humanity in so many minds to be more of a iconic symbol of our nation's birth and it's ideals. I wanted to learn more about the person - not just the icon.

Ellis' book is the second biography I've read on Washington. (John Ferling's is the other.) While there is certainly plenty of personal interpretation on Ellis' behalf, there's also plenty of reality.

I know some readers are put off by this. They want to remember and recognize Washington for the great man he was and deem any attempt at adding to that picture as sacrilegious. I disagree. I think seeing a more complete and flawed image of the man himself makes him more accessible. Washington is no longer this man way up there on a pedestal that we can never connect with or identify with. He's a real person that did some amazing things in his life because of his integrity and his fortitude. Nothing in this biography (or Ferling's for that matter)takes away from that. For me, today sitting on the other side of the cover of these two books, George Washington is a real human being that had his faults as well as his strengths. He's a guy that capitalized on what he's good at and who was able to hold together an infant nation of wildly diverse people's simply because of who he was and the leader he was. Washington isn't less of gifted leader to me after reading this book - in fact, seeing "all of him" makes him *more* of an awe inspiring man.

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