HIS EXCELLENCY National BestsellerTo this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting  scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier  historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes  seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington  as a military and political leader and a man whose statue-like solidity concealed  volcanic energies and emotions. Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous  survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Here is the free-spending  landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment  of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant  president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject  but also of the nation he brought into being.