His Excellency - Joseph J. Ellis

National Bestseller

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.