For King and Country

The Maturing of George Washington, 1748-1760

By Thomas A. Lewis

1993

First Published

3.78

Average Rating

296

Number of Pages

9H02M

Audio Length

"A daring book . . . a terrific story and Lewis tells it with rare narrative skill . . . a superb writer, with a startling command of the historian's art and a powerful interest in the moral aspects that history has always claimed. He also has in the young George Washington a subject of unfailing centrality and importance. His flaws, like those of any human figure worth his salt and worth our time, constitute the ground of his enduring human achievements." —Los Angeles Times Book Review "The story is compelling and Lewis tells it well." —Library Journal "Gracefully and attractively written." —Chicago Tribune For King and Country is a portrait of an ordinary young man enmeshed in extraordinary the young George Washington caught up, and striving to excel, amid the bitter rivalry between the French and British for control of the American colonial frontier in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing heavily on Washington's own diaries, letters, and dispatches, Thomas A. Lewis follows the future president's remarkable rise from a callow young man with no inheritance, no trade, and few prospects to the respected commander-in-chief of the military forces of British America's foremost colony.

Avg Rating

3.78

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

13%

4 STARS

52%

3 STARS

35%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Thomas A. Lewis

Author · 4 books

Thomas A. Lewis is a veteran journalist (National Wildlife, Smithsonian magazines) and broadcaster (Voice of America) who has written six non-fiction books, two of which received favorable critical attention nationwide. He became alarmed about the state of the environment while working as the executive editor of the Time-Life Books 16-volume series on the earth sciences, “Planet Earth,” and later when, as roving editor for National Wildlife Magazine, he traveled from Alaska to Costa Rica to chronicle the distress of animals and their ecosystems. It was while writing “EQ Index,” an annual assessment of the state of the US environment for National Wildlife and The World Almanac, that he began to suspect that pollution and exploitation of natural resources had reached a point of no return. That conviction led to his latest non-fiction work, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age—and to the present work of fiction, which imagines how that crash might happen, and how an American family might deal with it. He lives on a “sustainable-ready” farm in West Virginia where he has learned, he says, that “if my life depended on sustainable living I’d be dead now.”