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 Vintage, 2005 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 220 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose ?statue-like solidity? concealed volcanic energies and emotions.

Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject but also of the nation he brought into being.

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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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