Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace - Hardcover

George Washington; Richard Brookhiser

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9780813922188: Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813922186 ISBN 13: 9780813922188

Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr, 2003

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As a young man, George Washington admired and copied into a little notebook 110 rules for civil behavior that originated from a Jesuit textbook. Washington took these rules very much to heart, and that handwritten list remained with him throughout his life, serving as inspiring guidance from his military days at Valley Forge and Yorktown to his two terms as president.Guidance that at first sounds archaic, it is in fact just as relevant as―indeed, possibly more necessary than―it was nearly three hundred years ago. Richard Brookhiser makes clear the pertinence of these rules for modern readers and proposes that now more than ever we will be wise to follow the modest example of such a great man. Witty and insightful, Brookhiser’s commentary offers real-world instruction in the lost art of self-discipline, and his new preface provides a compelling and timely context in which to employ these guidelines today.

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About the Author:

Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of the National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer, is the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington; Alexander Hamilton, American; and America’s First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735–1918.

From Booklist:

The author of Founding Father (1996 ) provides a new edition of the book of moral and social precepts that served as a guide to virtue and etiquette for the first president of the U.S. Capitalizing on the success of his glowing biography of George Washington, Brookhiser has unearthed the slim volume of rules of civilized behavior that the youthful Washington laboriously copied into a notebook. According to both his contemporaries and his biographers, Washington valued good manners and painstakingly cultivated his own brand of formal courtesy. These seemingly quaint and archaic instructions, accompanied by the editor's often humorous commentaries and illustrated with period portraits and sketches, offer some timeless suggestions on how to cope with the complexities of social discourse. A delightful browsing item as well as a representative slice of eighteenth-century etiquette. Margaret Flanagan

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