So this book is a pretty standard biography of a white man from the Revolutionary period/early Republic. It's exhaustive in its use of sources, down to typical biography stuff like mining Washington's letters about ordering his clothes, and is a pretty decent attempt to take this person who is often like difficult to grasp as a person and make them more relatable or like.. accessible, to someone living today.

I will say, though, that there were things that were really like... yikes. Primarily this came through in the ways that Chernow wrote about Native peoples and Washington's interactions with them. Chernow really tried to be like "naw he was good with Native people!" without pointing out the fundamental flaw of like... settler colonialism and the violence that that perpetuates and how Washington really set this tone of policy of basically continuing the violence and really committing to that violence through the creation of the country (as well as his participation in settler colonialism in most basic terms, like if you're really invested in the "colony" part of "colonialism" and somehow thing settler colonialism ended when the US emerged as its own country but okay that's a fight we can have later.) Chernow also himself like... really does not do a good job with writing about Native peoples. He's really obsessed with reiterating stuff about like scalping without taking the hot second to expound on histories of that practice--like it was more important to him to write about the number of times Washington ordered specific clothing for himself than it was to interrogate dominant narratives about Native peoples, and I find that very troubling.

Additionally, I really think that Chernow's like attempts to understand Washington's relationship being an enslaver is like... sort of half-baked at times? He's not a hyper-apologist or anything, but he seems so confused and like, dude... it's called white supremacy. It existed and he was a white supremacist and like... acknowledging that and the way that it was passive and underlying may be helpful in like... thinking about white supremacy today??? So that was like a massive loss on that part, and so was a bummer.

(Also he keeps talking about Martha Washington and is like "she wasn't that beautiful!" and just... biographers, can we maybe drop this calling women unattractive like it was a critical part of who they are? Also like... I get that Washington's relationships with other women were intriguing, but can we like also maybe interrogate what constituted marriage in those days? People married for different reasons than they do now, and that's not bad or lesser, it's not like we "evolved" to settle on romantic love, that shit was foisted on us by the Victorians so.......... stop. Thanks. This was especially disappointing after the way Chernow wrote about Eliza Hamilton, like... Ron, you can do better than this!)

Otherwise, though, this was not necessarily a terrible slog to get through; Chernow gets you to the highlights while still being thorough (it kinda helps that he doesn't live to be that old, which is mean of me to say but also true) and his writing isn't super dry or anything. If you read Alexander Hamilton and went "wow I really wanna know more about Washington!" then this book is definitely for you! Most of my complaints, really, can be applied to just about any biography of an Old White Dude, so if you're okay with not interrogating what is bad about that historiography in general, you can just ignore my critiques!