Reviews biography alexander hamilton

I highly recommend this book.
I recommend this book to anyone 7 and up.
Literate and full of engaging historical asides.

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Book Review: Alexander Hamilton

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton. (aff.) New York: Penguin Books, 2004. 818 pages.

This book could be “Exhibit A” for why I love biographies. Ron Chernow is an excellent historian and an engaging writer. He has written several of my favorite biographies, including books on J.P. Morgan (House of Morgan) and John Rockefeller (Titan). He writes an adequate number of pages, researches extensively, and includes plenty of brilliant turns of phrases. Finally, Chernow picked a character who is both historically significant and personally fascinating.

Alexander Hamilton is considered one of the Founding Fathers of America, perhaps the only one of the famous founders who did not ultimately become president. I have read biographies on George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, and Hamilton regularly appears in those narratives, rarely in a positive light. Only George Washington seemed to genuinely admire his talents, and Washington was seldom wrong in such estimations.

Hamilton is someone about whom one c

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Reading the Best Biographies of All Time

Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
818 pages
The Penguin Press
Published: April 2004

Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” was published in 2004 and remains one of the most popular biographies of all time. It was a New York Times best-seller and served as the inspiration behind Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning musical “Hamilton.” Chernow is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Washington: A Life.” His most recent biography “Grant” was published in 2017.

Few books come with higher expectations than this biography of America’s most brash, self-assured and hyperkinetic Founding Father. But not only does Chernow’s narrative of this intriguing Revolutionary-era figure surpass lofty expectations, it may well set the standard for the nearly perfect biography.

Meticulously researched and brilliantly composed, this biography contains 731 pages of text and covers Hamilton’s entire life: from his tantalizingly chaotic early years to his untimely death at

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ALEXANDER HAMILTON

A splendid life of an enlightened reactionary and forgotten Founding Father.

“In all probability,” writes financial historian/biographer Chernow (Titan, 1998, etc.), “Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and lasting impact than many who did.” Indeed, we live in a Hamiltonian republic through and through, and not a Jeffersonian democracy. Many of the financial and tax systems that Hamilton proposed and put in place as the nation’s first treasury secretary are with us today, if in evolved form, as Chernow shows; and though Hamilton was derided in his time as being pro-British and even a secret monarchist, Chernow writes, he was second only to George Washington in political prominence, at least on the practical, day-to-day front. The author wisely acknowledges but does not dwell unduly on Washington’s quasi-paternal role in Hamilton’s life and fortunes; unlike many biographies that consider Hamilton only in Washington’s shadow, this one grants him a life of h