Lewis ( The Guns of Cedar Creek ) examines young George Washington as a figure illustrating the tension in the developing American character: the aristocratic ideals of the East Coast vs. the action-oriented pull of the West. Depicting early Easterners as valuing status and Westerners as drawn to change, Lewis suggests that Washington's work as surveyor of lands west of the Blue Ridge mountains, begun in 1748, altered his earlier goals of patterning himself on the English aristocratic tradition. While Lewis's negative assessment of Washington's ethnocentricity and treatment of land as a commercial commodity seems reductive and excessively colored by today's accepted moral views, his portrait successfully demonstrates the actions and events at play in his subject's evolution into an archetypal American.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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There is nothing flashy or trashy about For King And Country. It is a very well researched and very connected account of young Washington between 1748 and 1760.

I can't help, but, wonder if Thomas Lewis is a descendent of Washington's nephew Lawrence Lewis. There is that much cool headed depth of feeling evident in For King and Country.

We tend to forget that Washington had to personally put up with hundreds of uniquely American cantankerous characters during his youth. Thomas Lewis gives a little flavor to that part of the formation of young Washington's character. When Lewis contrasts Washington's "uncommon ambition" to be recognized by the British, and also recognized by those Virginians with British pretensions real or affected; Lewis firmly grasps Washington's American reality.

I do sincerely hope that Thomas Lewis writes of Geo Washington again.