George Washington Books

In her writing,Stella Tillyard manages to span the difficult gap that separates fiction from non-fiction. Her style is lyrical - almost like a historical fiction - but without the emotive judgement. I find that it makes her books highly evocative and very easy reading.

However that should not lead people to think she has a flare for dubious tabloid presentation. She is quite ruthless in ensuring that her facts are correct, and in 'Citizen Lord' she has stripped away many of the romantic layers that have concealed the true story of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. These were myths that had been spread by Lord Edward's family following his death, and have coloured his story since. The stripping away of these layers makes this book no less interesting, indeed the true story still very much romantic and tragic.

A younger son of the first Duke of Leinster and his wife Emily, a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, Lord Edward was born into privelege and influence. Tillyard traces his gradual move from this life, to one of revolutionary in Ireland of 1798 without descending into either pathos or into judgement.

I was first introduced to Tillyard's writing with her first book, 'Aristocrats' which is also available at Amazon. I would recommend this book as also worth reading, and gives marvellous background to 'Citizen Lord' - it is about his mother, Lady Emily Lennox, and her three sisters.

I think Tillyard is a "Must Read!"

You'll have to look elsewhere for a full picture of the catastrophic Irish rebellion of 1798, but Ms, Tillyard paints a lovely picture of its most romantic leader. I first heard of Lord Edward as a teenager, dipping into Yeats and reading Lord Edward's name linked to Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet..."that wild delirium of the brave...". I have read numerous accounts of '98 since, but found little about Lord Edward in them, save for the melodrama of his arrest and death-an extra-judicial murder, if ever there was one.

So I am grateful for Ms. Tillyard's rendering of the man himself. She gives ample proof of the sweetness of his character, showing how his inborn beauty was nurtured and how it blossomed under the doting care of his formidable and unconventional mother. Their tenderness for each other lights what otherwise is a stark and tragic story. More significantly it gives the lie to the masculinist theory that maternal love weakens and "feminizes" male children. True, young Lord Edward had a "strong male role model"-his tutor, who was also his mother's adulterous lover!-but every step of Mr. Ogilvie's tutelege was directed by the attentive and indulgent Duchess of Leinster. The letters between Lord Edward and the Duchess make lovely reading for any mother concerned with the making of boys into men.

Of course, Ms. Tillyard includes the apparently obligatory expressions of horror about "political violence" a phrase used only in reference to Lord Edward's revolutionary enterprise, not to the ongoing repression and dispossession of the native Irish. Taken against the whole of the book, however, this is only a minor stupidity, one so ubiquitous in books about Ireland published since 1969 that Republican readers can pass over it without undue offense.

The main thing is that Lord Edward Fitzgerald lives on these pages as a beloved and loving human being, worthy of all the praise heaped upon him over the centuries. How often does a shining name in history still shine under close inspection?

Anna Bradley

In this year of presidential campaigns I discovered this tome at the library & decided it was time I knew something about all the men who have held this rarified office. Filled with exacting & infinite details about their ages, occupations, ancestries, families plus the highlights of their terms, this is one useful, interesting & thoughtful reference book.

This is an amazing collection of facts on U.S. Presidents. Practically anything you ever wanted to know about the Presidents is in this book. A must-read! I recommend it to anyone, especially a presidential buff.

Elizabeth Drew, courageous journalist and scholar long based in Washington DC, here republishes a series of articles originally presented in the American intellectual journal New York Review of Books between May Day 2003 and Saint Valentine's Day 2004. Altough it reads with journalistic immediacy, the historical importance of the events described and of the larger issues addressed makes this collection essential reading for us now today, as we approach another election cycle.

Ms. Drew completely covers the ins and outs and hidden agendas of the first WBush regime. The first article in this collection in fact reports the doings and bio of Karl Rove, as it ostensibly is a review of the books Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential and Boy Genius: Karl Rove, The Architect Of George W. Bush's Remarkable Political Triumphs. This article remains important for us to consider now, as it exposes the nefarious strategies of this powerful man, who recently claimed to join the rats abandoning the sinking ship of state, but who remains firmly in power.

Among those who have been lost since the publication of this book is of course General Colin Powell, who here emerges as a noble and even heroic figure of integrity, but a tragically heroic due to his honesty, integrity, diplomacy (over war, which he experiened first hand, unlike the civilian saber rattlers involved) and his wisdom, and thus not one long to endure within the darkening regime of the W.

The second article republished comes from June 12, 2003, and mostly focuses on the neocons in power, inclduing Perle and company, and thus of course the corrupt, embezzling proposed puppet Iraqi president Chabadi. This article gives us further insight into how and why things went horribly wrong in Iraq.

The third article entitled Hung Up in Washington examines the Tom Daschle book Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever with many realted issues. It examines the shifts of power at that time, and includes insight into 9/11/01 on Capitol Hill. It includes the interesting insight that no one ever revealed the source of the anthrax envelopes sent to Democratic congressional leaders's offices. One wonders (although not Drew) what happened there while their offices were evacuated for cleaning for weeks and what partisan bugs were installed.

Despite the slim size of this volume, at seventy pages, the substantial and well researched and elegant writing of Ms. Drew makes these important articles for us to re-read at this point in time. The excellent and measured preface by PBS's Russell Baker makes it even more valuable, and at this current price we cannot afford not to read it.

Know your history. Read this book.

If you are interested in the way that politics drives (in some cases distorts) how government accomplishes what it has to accomplish, or you're interested in how government actually works (not what flacks, spinners, and headlines would have one accept on faith), you're cheating yourself if you do not read everything that Elizabeth Drew publishes. This book is no exception.

Of the cataclysmic changes that The New Yorker magazine went through starting in the early 1990s, one of the earliest and worst (and that's saying something) was parting ways with Drew, who until then had been writing the Letter from Washington column, and publishing a book every couple of years, it seemed. Her reporting was and is unparalleled: factual, addressing in detail questions that actually matter, not polemical (unless one considers disappointment with the corrosive effect of money and political fund-raising polemical); its equivalent or even a reasonable substitute was and is not to be found elsewhere.

Her current periodical gig is with The New York Review of Books, and this book reprints 3 of her columns (2 are also book reviews) published in NYRB in May and June 2003 and February '04. They cover key aspects of Bush's political side (particularly Karl Rove); the current Congress (which doesn't present much contrast to the Bush Administration); and Bush's Iraq-focused side (the "neocons"). The Rove and Congress pieces are the latest dispatches in Drew's long-term effort to report on how the profession of political strategy affects policy outcomes.

The neocons piece is quite different, and it is important because its subject is one of the more successful projects in the history of American policy entrepreneurship. A few friends/colleagues with ideas about the Middle East, not one an elected official (except Dick Cheney), convince the world's current great power, led by a man who campaigned against "nation building," to wage a major war that fulfills their dreams. Most entrepreneurs would be satisfied if they convinced investors to put up money and start a successful business; in the policy world it's a coup if a ground-breaking law is enacted (maybe even an agency created). But a war--billions invested (with a vague up-front price tag), thousands dying and sacrificing--and the conquest of a sovereign nation: for that you have to give the neocons their due. And study them. Drew's report is a fascinating short account of a subject that has generated several books and will continue to do so.

Why are some people courageous and others not? Just what is courage? Robinson addresses these questions in Part One with writing that is neither dry nor academic. This is not a textbook, it is an interesting read that explains a lot about the nature of courage and the way courage has shaped the history of America. In Part Two, Robinson presents seven compact biographies of Americans who have shaped American history: George Washington, David Crockett, Robert Gould Shaw, Crazy Horse, Matthew Henson, Rachel Carson, and Karen Silkwood.

While I appreciated the narrative style of "Founding Courage" and enjoyed it as an informative historical book, students will especially find it useful.

I have never been one for history books, but I have to tell you that if my history classes had books like this, I would have gotten straight A's. This book is truly fascinating not only because it highlights examples of courage in history, but it also leaves you considering your own character. The stories are inspiring and the book is very well-written. It does not read like a history textbook, yet I learned so much. It is amazing to think about the courage that people have inside of them, facing their fears fully knowing the potential consequences. This is a must read!

After reading the book, I realized how much more I knew about American History in general. Little did I know that Washington was such a conservative. I did not think I knew so little before I read this, but now I am filled with information that wants to be shared. His explanations on the state of America from pre-revolutionary times until the signing of the constitutions are extremely interesting. This is on top of the extensive information on the father of our country. I came out of this book with a new understanding of how the country was formed and a new love for the work that out founding fathers did. Great book for anyone interested in American History. Especially great read for George Washington fans. This is scholarly writing at its best!

We tend to be too focused on the constitution as a document that is somehow frozen in time. We forget too often that as ratified it was very vague on any number of subjects as to how the various branches of government would work. We also too often assume that the way it broadly works now is the way it always worked. Hah!
Recently, we have been blessed by work by scholars like David Currie and Akhil Amar Reed that remind us that the Constitution is not just a document but a history of practices based on that document. Our early Congresses, Presidents and Supreme Court Justices had to decide how to perform their functions. How were the seperation of powers and the checks and balances to work?
Many of these issues took years to settle (e.g., the idea of judicial review).
George Washington played an incredibly vital role in many of these decisions. Flexner, in his biography called Washington, 'the indispensable man". This is as true of his role in the ratification debates and the early years of the new government as it was in the Revolutionary War.
So says Glenn Phelps to which I say, "Amen". There is a telling moment in the first volume of Farrand's Records of the Convention when the delegates first consider placing the executive in one man. After the motion is seconded, Madison notes, "A considerable pause ensuing.." (Farrand, 1:65) which is broken only after Washington asks if they just want to go ahead and vote on the motion and Franklin asks everyone to speak their mind. The delegates were reticent about speaking their minds on the reasons they would limit the powers of the office of President simply because they all assumed that Washington would be that President. Only after they were encouraged by Washington and Franklin did they then speak their minds!
I would also argue that one of the factors that contributed to the new Constitution being accepted was that everyone in the country thought that way. Most people trusted Washington to not abuse the powers he would have. They trusted him to set the tone for the office. Amazing, when you think about it.
Phelps argues (rightly, I think) that Washington's ideas about government were formed by a rather classical republicanism and by his experiences in the Revolutionary War.
His classical and conservative republicanism led him to believe that government had to be founded on the people but that the people should be represented in the government by the "best" men in their states. The best were those who had the capacity to rise above local interests to discern the true national interest and who also had the virtue to persue that national interest over any of their own. In this he was no democrat. He did not believe that representatives were to mirror local interests or to be tied down by instructions by those local interests. The people had to trust their representative to do what was best. (Phelps, p.83)
For me the most interesting part of Phelps' book is his examination of Washington's terms as President. Washington set many precedents as to how appointments were to be made, what the function of the Cabinet would be, what would be the relationship of the President to the Congress and both to the various departments of the Executive.
There are too many examples for me to be inclusive so I will give you one that was new to me. Phelps feels that Washington was very influenced by the success of his "council of war" policy during the Revolution. Washington would explain overall strategic objectives to his junior officers and then ask for advice on a series of questions. These councils served the dual function of giving the junior officers the big picture and, perhaps, of improving that same strategy. Phelps feels that Washington tried to model his cabinet on that idea (pp 160-3). But he went further than that initially. He tried unsuccessfully to incorporate the Supreme Court and the Senate into the idea of the "consultative presidency". Phelps argues that Washington's well-known visit to the Senate where he asked for advice on the instructions to be used in negotiations with the Creek Indians is an example of this (pp. 167-72). Washington took literally that part of the Constitution that the Senate had an "advise" function to play in treaties as well as an approve function.
All-in-all, this is a very enjoyable, informative and well-written book. The overall picture of Washington that emerges (as pretty much the leader of the Federalists) will disturb some people but it should not really surprise them.
One more brief comment. I almost always have to throw something in on the limits of originalism as a judicial philosophy.
All aspects of our government have a history. There is no denying the vagueness of our Constitution on most subjects that it touches. That vagueness can be somewhat focused by the ratification debates. But even then most of the details of governance went unanswered. Phelps, Currie, Reed and others are very right to point out that those details were filled in by the early administrations and beyond. Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Cleveland, McKinley, both Roosevelts and others more contemporary have interpreted their role as Presidents. I know people hate the phrase but it really is a "living document". We the People are what gives it life not the other way around.
In any case, this is an excellent introduction to the effect on Constitutional development by Washington. Phelps is to be thanked for having filled an obvious void with this fine volume.

This is a small book that includes a lot of fascinating information. Don Higginbotham is a historian who's studied George Washington carefully, and he wrote and delivered three papers on Washington's influence on the American military, as lectures at Mercer University. This book includes those three lectures, reworked and lengthened, along with a fourth chapter he wrote for this book, contrasting and comparing George C. Marshall, the US Chief of Staff in World War II and later Secretary of State and author of the Marshall Plan, with Washington.

The author's main premise can be succinctly stated. Washington was a fine model for the American army to follow and build on, because of his character and sense of duty. He deliberately restrained himself and others from abusing his power as commander in chief during the Revolution, and that example served as the framework for the behavior of generals in the years since. Washington was working without benefit of examples, in many ways: no one had ever dealt with a government like the Continental Congress before, because there hadn't been a government like it in the past. So Washington essentially was making it up as he went along, and the result was exemplary, and has done us proud in the years since.

This is an excellent little book, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in Washington or the American military.

Whether you are interested in George Washington specifically, or military history generally, this book is a must read. Higginbotham, a well-respected University of North Carolina history professor has done a magnificent job of explaining the unique relations between civilian and military interests that are so crucial in our form of government. In the process, you are sure to gain a renewed appreciation for George Washington, the military leader whose character and forebearance created a solid foundation for American military tradition.

Michael Rockland's book "The George Washington Bridge: Poetry In Steel"
Is both brilliant and funny--a rare combination. The book is as much
about Rockland's love affair with, and experiences on, the bridge as
about the bridge itself. After so many books on the less consequential
Brooklyn Bridge, it's about time the George, the world's busiest bridge still after 75 years, got its due. The highlight of the book is Rockland's adventures on the bridge, including climbing to the top of one of the towers. I've read many of Rockland's books. This one, beautifully illustrated, is his best. A must read.

I love everything about this book. From its light weight, beautiful insert photos, and accurate yet engaging historical prose, I couldn't put it down. For anyone who lives in the tri-state area, or just loves New York, this is a wonderful read. I bought three copies for friends who love history books.

I found this book to be well written and easy to read. I was totally blow away by George Washington Carver's life story! This book should be a must read in every classroom, especially for Black History month of February, when children are learning about the minority influences and contributions to the history of the United States of America. I HIGHLY recommend the reading of this book.

George Washington Carver was one of the most amazing people I've read about. I'm thoroughly impressed with this man's testimony and life example. Wow!!...this simply sums it up.

George Washington Carver (c. 1864 - January 5, 1943) was an American botanical researcher and agronomy educator who worked in agricultural extension at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, teaching former slaves farming techniques for self-sufficiency.

This biography is an incredibly easy to read book and an excellent portrait of perhaps America's most significant botanist and agricultural scientist. His story of perseverence and faith, while confronting the racial bigotry of his time, is truly inspiring. If all you know about George Washington Carver is that he invented peanut butter then you need to read this book!

George Washington Carver
By Sam Wellman
9/24/02

This summer I read. The incredible inspiring novel called George Washington Carver, a biography written by Sam Wellman .The book was about George Washington Carver an inventor and educator. This book showed that George Washington Carver's life was very tough back in the 1870's.The book let's you see life back then, but not just anyone's life a person's life that anyone in some way can relate to.

One non-stop turning point thought out this book was that George Washington Carver being on his own and growing up all by himself .One of most the interesting things in this book was the passage "Born the Son of Slaves, he would work with Gods Help to free the South". That was a remarkable description of what George Washington Carver meant to some people, because he believed so much in God and so did everybody else and also because he did every thing he could for the south. Thougthout the book it was very easy for me to keep track of the main character because the book was a biography. A book about someone's life. In the whole book I can really say, "It felt like George Washington Carver really played his role in history''. (1871 - 1943)

I would recommend this book to any person looking for an exciting book,. The type of reader for this book would be a person who likes to read about other peoples history or life story, a person who can put their self in a place like George Washington Carver's and understand his point of view, or someone who is willing, and has faith in God should read this wonderful book. I liked this book a lot. And I also enjoyed it because of the fact that the author of the book wrote many other titles.

Great book, I highly recommend adults read with youth and discuss. I thought the ideas contained in this book were very positive and overall very appropriate for motivating young minds. I look forward to reading more from the author and sharing it with the youth that I come in contact with.

I bought this as a gift for my niece last Christmas. It was admittedly an attempt to expose her to other cultures and achievements. The best compliment was paid as she described the book to her teacher, who asked that she bring this in to read it to the class. I read this and its a good explanation of a brilliant man who thrived in his time. A good read for kids of any background.