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Title: The Grand Idea : George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West by Joel Achenbach ISBN: 0-684-84857-0 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 10 June, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.77 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Grand Idea -- The Grand Read
Comment: "The Grand Idea -- George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West" is a must read for any student of the Founding Fathers, Lewis and Clark, and any native Washingtonian. Revealing anecdotes generally unknown to casual history buffs, "The Grand Idea" is classic Achenbach, filled with entertaining vignettes of the General's life between the end of his tenure as Commander in Chief of the revolutionary forces and his election as the first president of the United States.
Binding the short stories together by focusing on Washington's plans to open the "near West", that area generally thought of today as the Ohio River Valley, Achenbach weaves a thoroughly readible volume, enteraining to the last, and full of his wit and ever-philosophical bent. It seems as if every second or third paragraph ends with yet another analytical barb, moving the reader to seek out the next great line, often accompanied by an out-loud chuckle.
Mixing history, with "story" and analysis is what made this book so much fun to read. A classic example of Achenbach musing is contained in a short diatribe on alcohol and its role in the early western life:
"Alcohol is a recurrent element of frontier writing. The settlers are drunk, the Indians are drunk, ther travelers soon become drunk. Whiskey cost 3 cents a glass. Wagoners would dance to a fiddler, drink all night, and would never repair to their room, since they had no room, only a claim to a few square feet on the barroom floor. They smoked crude cigars that emitted a mephitic stench and were priced at four for a penny. That such twists of tobacco were smoked by drivers of Conestoga wagons gave the cigars their enduring name: Stogies."
Not content to leave the description there, Joel adds, "We can imagine what this world smelled like. But what did it look like?"
Well, Mr. Achenbach proceeds to tell us what it looked like, in grand fashion. Pick it up; read it; and you'll know what George Washington's Potomac looked like.
Rating: 4
Summary: Engaging history with a strong sense of place
Comment: Having just finished Tom Wicker's disappointing Penguin Lives biography of George H.W. Bush, I was a little down on the idea of journalists attempting to write history. But Joel Achenbach, whose work I've enjoyed in The Washington Post for some time, has restored my faith. "The Grand Idea" is both a well-researched work of history and an enjoyable story of a side of The Father of Our Country we seldom see. Americans seem to love books about the founders, and this is one that will repay reading with both entertainment and learning.
Achenbach has taken a relatively obscure episode in George Washington's life -- a trip to his western holdings in 1784 -- and teased out of it (validly, I believe) connections to larger themes surrounding America's growth and development. Washington saw the Potomac not only as a potential commercial artery (and a source of personal profit), but also a means of binding together the relatively settled east with the frontier west. In Washington's mind, the high-minded and national blended with the pecuniary and the personal. Achenbach manages to keep a light tone while dealing not only with the General's statistics-laden and just-the-facts prose, but also with his evasions and even, frankly, hypocrisies.
Once Washington died, some of the momentum went out of the Potomac development schemes. The same is unfortunately true, to a degree, of Achenbach's story. Without the figure of Washington and the narrative of his travels and ideas, the book begins to wander a bit. The unfolding development of the Potomac canal, including the story of the B&O versus C&O rivalry, is interesting but unfocused, while the Civil War on the Potomac -- worthy of books in and of itself -- felt rushed. Having lived for about ten years, off and on, in the D.C. suburbs, I found the discussion of the modern Potomac and its place in the Washington metroplex a fun coda, but I wonder if other readers will respond the same way.
In spite of this slight loosening of the narrative bonds in the latter parts of the book, I still recommend "The Grand Idea" highly. As entertainingly-written history, it should be very accessible to general readers. If you dragged around McCullough's "John Adams," for example, you should definitely reward yourself with some Joel Achenbach. At the same time, it's still a rigorous enough work of history that specialist readers can feel safe in checking it out too. And that's not a bad balance for a book to strike.
Rating: 5
Summary: A River Runs Through It: GW and What America Was To Be
Comment: Joel Achenbach's The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West is an elegant fusion of American business history, presidential biography, and geography, told as a good and gripping story. Achenbach does a remarkable thing in this book: he explores an important theme - George Washington's ambitions for what the young republic should become when it grew up -- without the weighty tone of scholarship typical of such treatments. The book has a charming, almost conversational style which reveals the contradictions, ambiguities and tensions in the life of Washington and his peers in their messy humanity and the rough social reality of their contemporary context. Achenbach is a witty, insightful and incredibly competent sherpa through this landscape and history; he never lets his prose eclipse the inherent drama of the story. And he stops the narrative now and then to chat with the reader on the matter at hand, as in this passage on historical interpretation:
.... All of which is a reminder that history is not an exact science and at moments is more like a séance, a desperate attempt, in the mist and fog, to channel the voices of the dead.
The story is fascinating at several levels: the description of the young country as so fractured that any assertion of Federal authority threatened to drive states out of the Union; the tensions between the first President's private and public agendas; the inability of investors and policy makers to know when a new technology (the railroad) had made another (the canal) obsolete. These are all themes that resonate through American history; it is as if Achenbach has discovered their headwaters in this brilliant and highly readable book.
Anyone interested in American history, the presidency, the history of the city of Washington, or economic history will love this book. Buy it and read it!
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Title: Washington's Crossing (Pivotal Moments in American History) by David Hackett Fischer ISBN: 0195170342 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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