TRAVELS WITH GEORGE

Does George Washington still matter? The bestselling author argues for his unique contribution to the forging of America by retracing his journey as a new President through the former colonies, now an unsure nation. A new first-person voice for Philbrick, weaving history and personal reflection into one narrative. When George Washington became president in 1798, the United States of America was still a loose and quarrelsome confederation and a tentative political experiment. Washington undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about their lives and their feelings about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing--Americans. Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called ''the infant woody country''--and to see for himself what it had become in the 230 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his travel companions (wife and puppy), Philbrick follows the tour of America that Washington went onafter becoming President--an almost 2,000-mile journey from Mount Vernon to the new capital in New York, a tour of New England, a venture out across Long Island, and into the hinterlands of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The narrative movessmoothly back and forth from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, so we see the country through Washington's eyes as well as Philbrick's. Written at a moment when America's foundational ideals--or claims to them--are under scrutiny, Travels with George grapples bluntly and honestly with George Washington's legacy as a man of the people, a mythical figure of the early republic,