His Excellency

Joseph J. Ellis turns his attention to George Washington, a man who can seem as distant and fixed as the carved face on Mount Rushmore. This biography looks at Washington as a military commander, a political leader and a private person, and argues that his famously stone-like composure covered intense energies and strong emotions.

The book follows him through the stages of his life. It begins with a rash young officer who came through combat so narrowly that he half believed he could not be killed. It then turns to a landowner who spent freely and fell into debt to English merchants, a experience that bred in him a sharp resentment of imperial authority. Ellis also covers the general who lost more battles than he won, and the president who was reluctant to take the office and tried to stay above the factional quarrels among his cabinet members.

Ellis is a leading historian of the Revolutionary era, and he brings careful scholarship and a graceful prose style to the portrait. The result is a book that helps explain Washington himself and also the country he did so much to create.