General George Washington: A Military Life.

General George Washington: A Military Life. By Edward G. Lengel. (New York: Random House, 2005. Pp. xlii, 450. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-0-8129-6950-4; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4000-6081-8; e-book, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-58836-480-7.)

Bookshelves are already weighed down with biographies of George Washington, and some people may think there is no need for another one. However, they would be wrong. There is always room for a fine addition such as this one by Edward G. Lengel. Rich in its scholarship, yet written with clarity and wit aimed at a popular rather than an academic audience, Lengel reminds us that Washington was first and foremost a soldier. After a brief nod to the recent scholarship that has examined Washington as an administrator, slaveholder, and politician, Lengel sets about his own mission to reassert the importance of Washington's military life.

This is a military biography only, not a multidimensional study, if readers want information about Washington's presidency or his relationship with his wife, this is not the book to pick up. It is also not a history of the Revolutionary War. Lengel is following Washington's military life, and there is very little here on anything that happens away from him. For example, the assault on Quebec and the southern campaign under General Nathanael Greene are dismissed in a few sentences. While that might frustrate a few readers, Lengel is true to his mission.

Although this volume has a single focus, it is rich and complex. This is a warts-and-all biography. Lengel is an admiring biographer, but he is blunt about Washington's faults. He recognizes that Washington was not a creative thinker, that he could be impulsive and vindictive and, as a soldier, reckless, careless in his planning, and occasionally capable of coming up with ideas that were "truly harebrained" (p. 164). In bringing this last item under the spotlight, Lengel spares the hero nothing. Washington's plan to attack the British while they were holed up in Boston was, Lengel notes, "born of impatience and smacked of desperation," and his subordinates, who rejected the plan, thought that "Washington did not know what he was talking about" (pp. 115, 119). But Lengel also celebrates Washington's accomplishments in arenas both extraordinary and mundane, from his personal bravery and leadership at Monmouth to his compassion and hard work at Valley Forge. While acknowledging that there were many "better strategists, tacticians, administrators, and politicians among his contemporaries," Lengel, like many others before him, concludes that he was "the savior of his country" (pp. xlii, 371).

Because Lengel keeps his focus tight, there is little beyond the essential on Washington's subordinates. An alphabetical list of brief biographies of the cast of main characters at the front of the book allows the author to keep the text focused on Washington without distracting biographical asides about other individuals. Washington's officers come under the metaphoric microscope only when they are in direct contact with him, but Lengel discusses them only insofar as they illuminate Washington's character. Readers do learn a great deal about the senior British officers against whom Washington fought, and that contribution is one of the book's great strengths. Battle involves an intimate relationship between opposing forces, and Lengel's accounts of Washington in battle includes detailed examinations of what his enemy was doing and thinking.

Lengel faces the difficulty of writing about events with which many readers are already familiar. Despite this, his fast-paced accounts of campaigns are always entertaining, sometimes funny, and occasionally gripping. The chapter on the Philadelphia campaign is a fine example of how an account of military action can be tautly written, filled with suspense, and still rich in its exploration of character and ideas. After sweeping through his detailed analysis, a reader can agree with Lengel's assessment that the battle of Brandywine was one of British general William Howe's "finest moments, and probably Washington's worst battlefield performance" (p. 242). Yet the author succeeds in keeping the reader sympathetically engaged with his protagonist.

Lengel is an associate editor at the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia whose intimate knowledge of Washington's writings allows him to present this close analysis of this general's military life and how it shaped and was shaped by his character. Each generation needs to write its own assessment of Washington's military abilities, and Lengel has done it for this one--to the delight of the rest of us.

CAROLINE COX

University of the Pacific