You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

We need to question and review everything—including presidential biographies—but there’s an expectation that women will write books about women; people of color will write about people of color.

Everyone knows that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, a woman is probably a shrew. And shrews, of course, need taming.

Political partisanship, Washington predicted, would reduce the government to a crowd of bickering representatives who were very good at thwarting each other but got very little accomplished for their constituents. And for all his talk of unity, he had come to see people as for or against his administration and had little patience for criticism. Unbridled partisanship was his greatest fear, and his greatest failure was that he became increasingly partisan.