You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
(Viking, $27)
However many previous George Washington biographies can be found, “it’s a safe bet that none are quite like Alexis Coe’s,” said Rachel King in Fortune.com. Beginning with its title, “the book just jumps up and asks you to pay attention,” said Karin Wulf in SmithsonianMag . com. Coe, a historian, presents America’s first president as a flawed but still impressive human being, and does so by combining thorough research with an impatience for myths. One of the cheeky lists that opens the book is titled “Lies We Believe About the Man Who Could Not Tell Them.” A few pages later, Coe raps several esteemed scholars as “the thigh men of dad history” because of their odd fixation on Washington’s apparently robust upper legs. For the average history fan, “there is much
to savor and enjoy,” said Marjoleine Kars in The Washington Post. Our hero “comes across as a man amply possessed of charm and gravitas.” He could be petty and quick to anger, though; he lost more battles than he won; he was “downright brutal” in his treatment of Native Americans; and he managed, during his presidency, to convert Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe from admirers into critics. Then there is Washington the slaveowner. Though he spoke against slavery, he had his own slaves whipped, paid meagerly to extract their teeth for use as his own, and freed only one slave in his will. His wife, Martha, freed the other 123 within a year—“lest they kill her.”
Coe’s imperfect Washington even resembles our current president in one respect: his intolerance for criticism, said David Shribman in The Boston Globe. But Coe ultimately shares previous biographers’ admiration for the man, even as she remains less starry-eyed. Washington could be stingy, hypocritical, and simply fallible. But he understood that America’s chief executive should be a sober, selfless leader willing to relinquish power after a brief rule. We can thank him for setting that precedent, “and we can thank Coe, in her effort to make him more accessible and real.”