**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.