From National Book Award winner Ron Chernow comes a biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation. The inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton!
... moving and masterly...by far the best biography ever written about the man ... Other writers have done better jobs describing Hamilton's political philosophy, but nobody has captured Hamilton himself as fully and as beautifully as Chernow ... Hamilton's relationship with his wife and family is one of the revelations of this book ... [Hamilton's] widow outlived him by 50 years, trying vainly to repair his reputation against the assaults from the Jeffersonians. As Chernow is aware, this book finally accomplishes her task.
... as Chernow’s comprehensive and superbly written biography makes clear, Hamilton was at least as influential as any of our Founding Fathers in shaping our national institutions and political culture ... Chernow acknowledges Hamilton’s arrogance, his bouts of self-pity, and his penchant for cynical manipulation. But this self-made man was capable of great compassion and was consistently outraged by the institution of slavery. Although his understanding of human limitations made him suspicious of unrestrained democracy, his devotion to individual liberty did not falter.
... gripping ... an elegantly written, richly detailed account of Hamilton’s tempestuous life and it gives as good an understanding of revolutionary America as anything I’ve read ... what Chernow’s book so wonderfully captures, was the energy, valour, ambition and idealism that characterised Hamilton’s life and still characterises the bold republic that he fought so bravely and determinedly to build.
