Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow (Penguin, 2010)

This is not your daddy’s biography on Washington…it’s Ron Chernow’s.

If that name doesn’t ring a bell, maybe some of his former books will. His first book was The House of Morgan which won the National Book Award. He followed that with biographies on Alexander Hamilton and most recently, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller,  Sr. Both of those were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.

In an interview with The New York Times recently, Chernow explained what prompted him to undertake this newest subject matter. He had learned that there was an ongoing project at the University of Virginia dealing with Washington’s papers that was begun in 1968 and to date has filled roughly sixty volumes with information, much of it new. Chernow felt this was the time to write a “cradle to grave” biography of arguably the most important person in our nation’s history.

When one thinks about the lives of other famous American patriots like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin there comes to mind a good bit of knowledge–both important and antidoctal. We know enough to have a full picture of them as patriots and men but not so much with Washington. What pops in our heads is: cutting down the cherry tree, his wooden dentures and crossing the Delaware. And he really doesn’t look very interesting in that portrait that hangs on the wall of every elementary school room.

Chernow was determined, though, to flesh out this person not many of us know. Washington was an accomplished horseman, an elegant dancer, a hunter and an extremely vain man. He worried to death over what he should wear to his inauguration! He had a very difficult mother, was infatuated with an older married woman named Sally Fairfax and left strict instructions in his will that his slaves at Mount Vernon were to be freed upon Martha’s death and that’s only the beginning…

I am a history buff so this book looks fascinating to me but even if you are not, as Americans, it would behoove us all to know more of our nation’s past and those people who played a particularly important part in its creation, none more so than George Washington. -Norma

 

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