Good day citizens and welcome to this week's Thomas Jefferson Hour, the podcast.

Oh the podcast issue of the Jefferson Hour and this week really

satisfying and delightful interview with Peter Stark of Missoula, Montana, the author of a relatively new book on the young George Washington called Young Washington, how wilderness and war forged America's founding father.

This was a really fun read.

Well, such an utterly interesting story that Young Washington was a bit of a bumbler,

his vain, he's whiny, he he's erratic he hasn't yet absorbed the great stoic wisdom that led him to be one of the most remarkable men of the American revolutionary, he's sort of figuring himself out, out there

on the frontier, fiercely ambitious and totally insecure, and he winds up playing a significant role in the early phases of the French and Indian War.

Well, it's been a couple of weeks of fun with Washington, if I could put it that way.

Fun with Washington.

Yes.

Last week we talked to President Jefferson and this week we talked to the author Peter Stark.

I have to say that, you know, Washington is somebody that I feel deficient in my knowledge of.

So I was really glad to spend some time.

If I was doing my homework, I'd probably read Chernau's Washington.

Chernau has a major huge tome on George Washington. There's also Richard

Norton Smith's patriarch which is my favorite single volume book on Washington.

Flexner wrote a book called The Indispensable Man which

set that title for all time about Washington's centrality. To all this, John

Marshall, Jefferson's cousin wrote a four-volume biography of George Washington, which Jefferson said was like

a mausoleum, you know, like hagiography.

And so there's a huge historiography on Washington, but you know he's seen as kind of a wooden, stiff, aloof.

Not so much in this book. Not in this book. This is the young adolescent, Washington.

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