For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748-1760 - Hardcover

Lewis, Thomas A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0785821015 ISBN 13: 9780785821014

Publisher: Castle Books, 2006

Synopsis

A portrait of George Washington’s formative years provides context to the story we all know.

About this title

From Library Journal:

Like most recent biographers of Washington, Lewis--an author and the publisher of Civil War magazine--prefers to look beyond the stiff public figure who embodied duty, honor, and country in favor of the passionate, anxious, ambitious, self-serving man underneath. In this Lewis succeeds, by describing Washington's formative years in the Ohio wilderness fighting the French and Indians. Lewis's argument that Washington's greatness stemmed from his experiences in frontier war--leading a recalcitrant militia, dealing with a parsimonious legislature, and tirelessly promoting himself to one patron after another--has been made more thoroughly and imaginatively by Paul Longmore in his Invention of George Washington (Univ. of California Pr., 1988). Lewis does provide more context for a general reader, however. The story is compelling and Lewis tells it well. For general collections.
- David B. Mattern, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

Lewis ( The Guns of Cedar Creek ) examines young George Washington as a figure illustrating the tension in the developing American character: the aristocratic ideals of the East Coast vs. the action-oriented pull of the West. Depicting early Easterners as valuing status and Westerners as drawn to change, Lewis suggests that Washington's work as surveyor of lands west of the Blue Ridge mountains, begun in 1748, altered his earlier goals of patterning himself on the English aristocratic tradition. While Lewis's negative assessment of Washington's ethnocentricity and treatment of land as a commercial commodity seems reductive and excessively colored by today's accepted moral views, his portrait successfully demonstrates the actions and events at play in his subject's evolution into an archetypal American.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Castle Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0785821015
• ISBN 13: 9780785821014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296