History Book Club: “His Excellency: George Washington”

The Gunn Memorial Library and Museum are excited to introduce a new monthly book club – History Book Club. History Book Club will meet the second Monday of the month at 1:00pm in the Wykeham Room at the Gunn Memorial Library. Participants will read nonfiction books on American history and meet to discuss. Museum Curator Amy Campanaro will facilitate the discussion and place historical topics in local context when appropriate. January’s book is His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis. Copies of this book are available at the front desk of the library. Registration for the meeting is requested.

Book synopsis:
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.

Register here