PositiveAir MailLess a meaty tale than a pupu platter of historical anecdote, travel writing, personal reminiscence, dog stories, and an alarming encounter with a tornado, the book may not fill you up, but you’ll probably find a lot to like ... The stories that Philbrick tells about these three carriage trips, to Rhode Island, Long Island, and South Carolina, meanwhile, serve as personal snapshots of our first president, caught in the act of nation-building ... Philbrick shows us a man of physical grace and character who grasped the personal effect he had on people ... Philbrick has great fun with the discovery that in many towns that Washington visited, there has been handed down for generations a version of a tale in which a child sees the president and blurts, \'Why, he’s only a man!\' The joke, obviously, is that, yes, he was just a man, but also so much more ... Including a slave owner. In the most upsetting part of the book, Philbrick introduces Ona Judge, a young woman held in bondage by Martha Washington ... Still, it’s disconcerting to see such a sad and ugly scar on the most indispensable figure of our founding myth.
