|
|
His Excellency: George Washington (Audio CD)
by Joseph J. Ellis
| Category:
American history, Fictional history, Biography |
| Market price: ¥ 368.00
MSL price:
¥ 348.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
|
|
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Fantastic, approachable chronicle of the genius and humanity of George Washington. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Joseph J. Ellis
Publisher: Recorded Books
Pub. in: October, 2004
ISBN: 1402544766
Pages:
Measurements: 5.4 x 5.7 x 2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BB00037
Other information:
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
One of the best crafted biographies of George Washington from a well known Pulitzer Prize winning author (Founding Brothers). |
|
- MSL Picks -
Drawing heavily from George Washington's own written work, Joseph J. Ellis concocts a fascinating picture of our first president, in the course of which showing how great a man Washington actually was.
Washington has always seemed an aloof figure - yes, he's revered as the father of our country, but we seem to hear very little about what he was actually like. This book not only does an excellent job of bringing out the human factor but shows why he deserves his place in history.
Through this book, we learn that Washington was deeply committed to the federacy, and that he is quite possibly the only man who could have done what he did as the first president - walk away after two terms in office. We also learn that one of Washington's greatest strengths was his ability to learn and change his mind. For instance, when he realized that his preferred, aggressive method of attack would not work against the British soldiers, he adopted a strategy of retreating slightly and then regrouping for attack.
We learn about his conflicted feelings regarding slavery, and of his conviction that the future of the nation lay toward the west. We also learned that he strongly believed that the Native American Tribes were nations in and of themselves and that treaties with them should be honored in the same way as treaties with European nations.
In this book, we see his growth from a young surveyor who is convinced he is destined for greatness, into the bold commander of the American forces who led the toops to victory as much through the sheer force of his personality as anything else. Never before and never again will anyone be so completely revered by the people of the United States - how many other presidents can say they were unanimously elected - twice? What's even more remarkable is that he was elected to the presidency without campaigning for it - indeed, he turned down the presidency several times before finally accepting it. This book very neatly dispels the idea that Washington turned the presidency down out of a sense of false modesty - he truly felt he was too old and wanted just to retire to Mount Vernon.
The author manages to evince sympathy for Washington; while reading, one is struck by how hard he tries to do what is right, not just for the times in which he lived but for posterity. He was very aware of his place in history and he chose his actions with an eye toward what people would think of him in the future. It is difficult to think of living in such a way that almost every action you take has to be carefully calculated, but nevertheless, that appears to be how he lived.
He need not have worried. He may never have chopped down a cherry tree or thrown a coin across the Potomac, but the true story of his life more than outdoes the childhood legends about him. I came away from this book with renewed admiration for the man, and an appreciation for the author who was able to take a remote figure and make him come to life.
(From quoting Dingdy Robinson, USA)
Target readers:
People interested in American history, George Washington and American culture, English majors, and advanced English learners.
|
|
Joseph Ellis is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers. His portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and their youngest son, Alex.
|
|
From Publisher
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.
|
Chapter One
Interior Regions
History first noticed George Washington in 1753, as a daring and resourceful twenty-one-year-old messenger sent on a dangerous mission into the American wilderness. He carried a letter from the governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, addressed to the commander of French troops in that vast region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and south of the Great Lakes that Virginians called the Ohio Country. He was ordered to lead a small party over the Blue Ridge, then across the Allegheny Mountains, there to rendezvous with an influential Indian chief called the Half-King. He was then to proceed to the French outpost at Presque Isle (present-day Erie, Pennsylvania), where he would deliver his message "in the Name of His Britanic Majesty." The key passage in the letter he was carrying, so it turned out, represented the opening verbal shot in what American colonists would call the French and Indian War: "The Lands upon the river Ohio, in the Western Parts of the Colony of Virginia, are so notoriously known to be the Property of the Crown of Great Britain, that it is a Matter of equal Concern & Surprize to me, to hear that a Body of French Forces are erecting Fortresses, and making Settlements upon that River within his Majesty's Dominions."
The world first became aware of young Washington at this moment, and we get our first extended look at him, because, at Dinwiddie’s urging, he published an account of his adventures, The Journal of Major George Washington, which appeared in several colonial newspapers and was then reprinted by magazines in England and Scotland. Though he was only an emissary - the kind of valiant and agile youth sent forward against difficult odds to perform a hazardous mission - Washington’s Journal provided readers with a firsthand report on the mountain ranges, wild rivers, and exotic indigenous peoples within the interior regions that appeared on most European maps as dark and vacant spaces. His report foreshadowed the more magisterial account of the American West provided by Lewis and Clark more than fifty years later. It also, if inadvertently, exposed the somewhat ludicrous character of any claim by "His Britanic Majesty," or any European power, for that matter, to control such an expansive frontier that simply swallowed up and spit out European presumptions of civilization.
Although Washington is both the narrator and the central character in the story he tells, he says little about himself and nothing about what he thinks. "I have been particularly cautious," he notes in the preface, "not to augment." The focus, instead, is on the knee-deep snow in the passes through the Alleghenies, and the icy and often impassably swollen rivers, where he and his companions are forced to wade alongside their canoes while their coats freeze stiff as boards. Their horses collapse from exhaustion and have to be abandoned. He and fellow adventurer Christopher Gist come upon a lone warrior outside an Indian village ominously named Murdering Town. The Indian appears to befriend them, then suddenly wheels around at nearly point-blank range and fires his musket, but inexplicably misses. "Are you shot?" Washington asks Gist, who responds that he is not. Gist rushes the Indian and wants to kill him, but Washington will not permit it, preferring to let him escape. They come upon an isolated farmhouse on the banks of the Monongahela where two adults and five children have been killed and scalped. The decaying corpses are being eaten by hogs.
In stark contrast to the brutal conditions and casual savagery of the frontier environment, the French officers whom Washington encounters at Fort Le Boeuf and Presque Isle resemble pieces of polite Parisian furniture plopped down in an alien landscape. “They received us with a great deal of complaisance,” Washington observes, the French offering flattering pleasantries about the difficult trek Washington’s party had endured over the mountains. But they also explained that the claims of the English king to the Ohio Country were demonstrably inferior to those of the French king, which were based on Lasalle’s exploration of the American interior nearly a century earlier. To solidify their claim of sovereignty, a French expedition had recently sailed down the Ohio River, burying a series of lead plates inscribed with their sovereign’s seal that obviously clinched the question forever.
The French listened politely to Washington’s rebuttal, which derived its authority from the original charter of the Virginia Company in 1606. It had set the western boundary of that colony either at the Mississippi River or, even more expansively, at the Pacific Ocean. In either case, it included the Ohio Country and predated Lasalle's claim by sixty years. However persuasive this rather sweeping argument might sound in Williamsburg or London, it made little impression on the French officers. "They told me," Washington wrote in his Journal, "it was their absolute Design to take Possession of the Ohio, they wou'd do it." The French commander at Fort Le Boeuf, Jacques Le Gardner, sieur de Saint Pierre, concluded the negotiations by drafting a cordial letter for Washington to carry back to Governor Dinwiddie that sustained the diplomatic affectations: “I have made it a particular duty to receive Mr. Washington with the distinction owing to your dignity, his position, and his own great merit. I trust that he will do me justice in that regard to you, and that he will make known to you the profound respect with which I am, Sir, your most humble and most obedient servant.”
But the person whom Washington quotes more than any other in his Journal represented yet a third imperial power with its own exclusive claim of sovereignty over the Ohio Country. That was the Half-King, the Seneca chief whose Indian name was Tanacharison. In addition to being a local tribal leader, the Half-King had received his quasi-regal English name because he was the diplomatic representative of the Iroquois Confederation, also called the Six Nations, with its headquarters in Onondaga, New York. When they had first met at the Indian village called Logstown, Tanacharison had declared that Washington’s Indian name was Conotocarius, which meant "town taker" or "devourer of villages," because this was the name originally given to Washington’s great-grandfather, John Washington, nearly a century earlier. The persistence of that memory in Indian oral history was a dramatic reminder of the long-standing domination of the Iroquois Confederation over the region. They had planted no lead plates, knew nothing of some English king’s presumptive claims to own a continent. But they had been ruling over this land for about three hundred years.
In the present circumstance, Tanacharison regarded the French as a greater threat to Indian sovereignty. “If you had come in a peaceable Manner like our Brethren the English,” he told the French commander at Presque Isle, “We shou’d not have been against your trading with us as they do, but to come, Fathers, & build great houses upon our Land, & to take it by Force, is what we cannot submit to.” On the other hand, Tanacharison also made it clear that all Indian alliances with European powers and their colonial kinfolk were temporary expediencies: “Both you & the English are White. We live in a Country between, therefore the Land does not belong either to one or the other; but the GREAT BEING above allow’d it to be a Place of Residence for us.”
Washington dutifully recorded Tanacharison’s words, fully aware that they exposed the competing, indeed contradictory, imperatives that defined his diplomatic mission into the American wilderness. For on the one hand he represented a British ministry and a colonial government that fully intended to occupy the Ohio Country with Anglo-American settlers whose presence was ultimately incompatible with the Indian version of divine providence. But on the other hand, given the sheer size of the Indian population in the region, plus their indisputable mastery of the kind of forest-fighting tactics demanded by wilderness conditions, the balance of power in the looming conflict between France and England for European domination of the American interior belonged to the very people whom Washington’s superiors intended to displace.
For several reasons, this story of young Washington’s first American adventure is a good place to begin our quest for the famously elusive personality of the mature man-who-became-a-monument. First, the story reveals how early his personal life became caught up in larger public causes, in this case nothing less grand than the global struggle between the contending world powers for supremacy over half a continent. Second, it forces us to notice the most obvious chronological fact, namely that Washington was one of the few prominent members of America’s founding generation - Benjamin Franklin was another - who were born early enough to develop their basic convictions about America’s role in the British Empire within the context of the French and Indian War. Third, it offers the first example of the interpretive dilemma posed by a man of action who seems determined to tell us what he did, but equally determined not to tell us what he thought about it. |
|
| View all 11 comments |
Michiko Kakutani (New York Times) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Mr. Ellis gives us a succinct character study while drawing on his extensive knowledge of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history to strip away the accretions of myth and contemporary extemporizing that have grown up around his subject... Mr. Ellis refuses to judge Washington by "our own superior standards of political and racial justice" but instead tries to show how Washington was seen in his day. In doing so he gives us a visceral understanding of the era in which the first President came of age, and he shows how Washington's thinking (about the war for independence, the shape of the infant nation and the emerging role of the federal government) was shaped by his own experiences as a young soldier in the French and Indian War and as a member of the Virginia planter class. The resulting book yields an incisive portrait of the man, not the marble statue... His Excellency is a lucid, often shrewd take on the man Mr. Ellis calls the "primus inter pares, the Foundingest Father of them all." And it does so with admirable grace and wit. |
David Hackett Fischer (Boston Sunday Globe) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Ellis [writes] with clarity and grace. He has a gift for reaching a broad public with substantive books on serious subjects. In His Excellency, he has done it again. This is an important and challenging work: beautifully written, lively, serious, and engaging... He has given us a book that will inspire other research, it will deepen our understanding of its subject.
|
Celia McGee (Daily News) (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Ellis skillfully uncomplicates many convoluted subjects, including the real and passionate Washington and the myths constructed around him, the economic and social forces driving him and his fellow revolutionarie... A distinguished addition.
|
Jeff Wehner (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Perhaps we will never know the man as well as we know the myth. Perhaps we should not. But for those interested in review of the man, the author prevents a very readable, and well researched biography of the first President. From the early ambitiousness, to the frustrations during the war, to the concerns fading heroes all have, this is a terrific overview of his life and times.
Tremendously well researched, the author reviews Washington's involvement with the French and Indian war, and how less than spectacular results during this time actually began his legendary status as a hero. Further explored is his relationship with the British that ultimately began his slide from loyal hero to revolutionary. Most interesting for me was the political intrigue occurring towards the end of his presidency. I mean, how does one exactly campaign against such an archetype? Yes, he stated that he would not seek a third term, setting a precedent for generations, but political parties were forming, and campaigning did occur. (I'll never think about Tom Pain the same way again.)
But more than the facts and stories, I felt that I was able to get an idea of the man's personality. This is indeed no small feat given not only what Washington did do, but what he did not do, rarely gave in to discussing personal reflection, never left journals with anything other then rudimentary facts.
|
View all 11 comments |
|
|
|
|
