All Cloudless Glory: The Life of George Washington [Paperback]

Harrison Clark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 21, 1998 | Series: All Cloudless Glory

In this second volume, Clark follows Washington through the end of his career as a great general, through his years as a statesman and president, to his final days at Mount Vernon.

Product Details

• Paperback: 591 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Books (April 21, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0895263718
• ISBN-13: 978-0895263711
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,215,073 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating, eye-opening look at our greatest president!, September 29, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: All Cloudless Glory Boxed Set (Hardcover)

During his life, and for 100 years afterward, George Washington stood on a plane above all his contempories, loved and honored. Recently, his stature has been diminished, and the impression has been left that Washington was not much of a general or president, and dim-witted to boot. In "All Cloudless Glory," Harrison Clark blows away all the dust and cobwebs and reveals Washington once more as the great man he was. Like a restorer who strips away the dirt and grime of centuries and reveals the bright colors of the painting beneath, Clark, quoting freely from the great mass of original Washington documents, makes Washington come alive. Did you know that Washington had a tremendous sense of humor, and liked to tell puns? This is just one of the little facts that Clark use to make his subject come alive. Similarly, Washington's whole life is illuminated to create a fascinating panorama. Every American should read this book!

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Information, But A Clumsy Format, May 4, 2000

By 

Brian Jay Jones (Damascus, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All Cloudless Glory: The Life of George Washington (Life of George Washington, Vol 1) (Paperback)

The first of Harrison Clark's two-parter on George Washington focuses on Washington's life and career up through 1781, and this volume closes with the victory at Yorktown that effectively ended the American Revolution.

I would take issue with the Book Description (above) which describes the main character in this book as the "youthful Washingon, one not transformed into the dignified figure we associate with our first president." While Washington does not become president at any point in these pages, all the traits that we look for in Washington -- the dignified figure, master politician and diplomat, and inspirational leader -- are already in well in place by the final third of this book. One factor that practically leaps off the pages is the all-out adoration that men and women alike, regardless of their place in society, felt for the man. Clark lets those who saw and interacted with Washington do the talking through their letters or diaries, and Washington's charisma shines brightly from these pages.

Clark has chosen to let Washington and his contemporaries tell the story of Washington's life and career through their own writings, and it would be a welcome choice but for one thing -- the book is organized so clumsily as to become disjointed. Rather than edit and organize the various writings into a narrative, Clark instead divides each chapter up into what I can only think to describe as a series of short vignettes.

For example, chapter 19, "Cambridge and Boston," is broken up into 11 smaller parts, some of them only half a page long. It makes progress rather like reading a college textbook, with each section broken into smaller subsections, separated by its own little bold-faced headline ("The Vanishing Army"). Clark does tend to group events into short pieces that make sense on their own, but lack the context of the larger story.

Clark wisely spends most of his time in this book outlining Washington's career in the Continental Army, but it is sometimes difficult to get an appreciation for the battles and skirmishes Washington fought because the maps of the battle sites are almost completely useless. The map of the 1776 New York Campaign, for example, is difficult to align with almost anything in the text.

It's a shame that Clark has chosen such a floppy format in which to present his information, because there's some really first-rate stuff in here (the chapter on Benedict Arnold's treason is a highlight of the book, although it, too, gets bogged down in some disjointed narration). If you've not had the opportunity to read Washington's own letters from this period, Clark provides you with lots of samples of Washington's writings which, by themselves, make this volume worth owning. But if you're looking for an easily accessible, readable biography, this one probably isn't for you.

Five stars for wealth of information presented, but only one star for the format, bringing this one down to a three.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Find another biography of Washington, April 15, 2006

By 

M. Roberts "MS Roberts" (North Carolina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All Cloudless Glory: The Life of George Washington (Life of George Washington, Vol 1) (Paperback)

In every respect, except for the subject, this book fails to earn your hard earned dollars. Poor editing, dull writing, and a lack of insightful analysis combine to eliminate this work from my suggested reading list. If it were not for a commitment of mine to finish every book I begin, then I would have stopped slogging through Clark's book around page twenty. My suffering reached its zenith when I read the subtitle he chose for a section, "General Howe Funks Out." This subtitle was only slightly worse than, "Washington is liked." With subtitles like these I seriously considered breaking my rule of completing every book I read. Nevertheless, the numerous passages Clark quotes from Washington's papers and diary entries give the book some merit; Washington himself could redeem the worst of books. But, why wade through Harrison's tiresome prose when you could simply read George Washington's diaries and gain all the merit while losing all the dross?