Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

I am not so much goinig to review this book but talk about what I gained from it. There has been a lot written about the man, much of it I have not read, so I cannot coment on the quality of this book vis-a-vis other biographies. What I can say is that this book is remarkably readable, and does not focus solely on the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress, nor his time as president. A full third of the book is leading up to his time in the public eye. I did not know anything about his childhood, his realtionship with his mother (now there was a difficult woman to please), and in many ways, this was the most interesting part of the book, precisely because of how little I knew about it. The book is quite readable, and despite it's length (800+ pages), it moves quickly.
I never tire of the accounts of Washington during the Revolutionary War. he made mistakes, but he learned from them, and he cared deeply about the men who found for him and with him. The conditions that soldiers were living in were appalling, and long lived. The war went on for 8 years (which used to seem like a long time, but that is how long we have been in Afghanistan at this point), and the ins and outs of how we gradually managed to elicit surrender from Britain are always worth reading another go round.
Nation building is something that we are particularly bad at in modern times, but it happened relatively quickly in Washington's time. It helped that we had been functioning largely as an independent self-governed nation with little interference from England prior to the war, and that there was litle in the way of cultural diversity at the time to contend with. But the process of creating a democracy is one that we could still learn from today, and the book is full of shifting allegiances, and some of the old adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer' when it came to Washington's finessing the way into nationhood.