For King and Country: George Washington the Early Years

"A daring book . . . a terrific story and Lewis tells it with rare narrative skill . . . a superb writer, with a startling command of the historian's art and a powerful interest in the moral aspects that history has always claimed. He also has in the young George Washington a subject of unfailing centrality and importance. His flaws, like those of any human figure worth his salt and worth our time, constitute the ground of his enduring human achievements." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The story is compelling and Lewis tells it well." —Library Journal

"Gracefully and attractively written." —Chicago Tribune

For King and Country is a portrait of an ordinary young man enmeshed in extraordinary events: the young George Washington caught up, and striving to excel, amid the bitter rivalry between the French and British for control of the American colonial frontier in the mid-eighteenth century.

Drawing heavily on Washington's own diaries, letters, and dispatches, Thomas A. Lewis follows the future president's remarkable rise from a callow young man with no inheritance, no trade, and few prospects to the respected commander-in-chief of the military forces of British America's foremost colony.