It has finally happened. Glenn Beck has written a whole book in which I can find nothing with which to disagree. Really. I find his newest offering—Being George Washington—to be perfectly innocuous. And what’s more, it is clear that Beck is trying to use his powers for good instead of evil. Gone is his usual stridence and arrogance. Here, he deals generously with those he disagrees with, and he genuinely tries to present George Washington as a suitable model for Americans of all political persuasions.
That said, it isn't a very good book.
It is hard to say what kind of book this is trying to be. The text fits into three distinct genre categories, any one of which could have made for a promising book about George Washington. The three categories are:
Historical Fiction: About 60% of the book could best be described as a historical novel written on the 5th-8th grade reading level. This novel deals very unevenly with Washington's life, beginning with the French and Indian War and focusing principally on the American Revolution before jumping to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and and the Farewell Speech in 1796. I call this portion a novelization, rather than a biography, because the author goes frequently into the minds of the characters and pulls out thoughts and motivations that go well beyond what any biographer could surmise. Take the first sentence of the book: "The colonel's horse was terrified." It is the novelist, not the biographer, who knows what goes on in the mind of a character's horse.
There is nothing particularly objectionable about the novelization portion of the book, but neither is there anything remarkable. Much the same narrative could be found in any one of dozens of young adult versions of the George Washington story.
Historical Analysis: A second component of the book--one not clearly delineated from the first--aims to analyze the significance of George Washington's life for the modern reader. Again, there is little to object to here. Most of the analysis fits within the general received wisdom about George Washington’s values: the importance of conviction, the need for fixed principles, an abiding belief in the justness of one's cause--that sort of thing. Much of this analysis comes in somewhat annoying grey boxes plopped in the middle of the novelization with titles like "Thinking Outside the Eighteenth-Century Box" and "What If He Had Been King?"
Leadership Manual: Beck begins the book with the assertion that all Americans can "be George Washington," which is to say that everybody can, by studying Washington's leadership principles, be the kind of person that Washington was and make a positive difference in the world. To help us along, he pauses the novelized narrative every now and then to point out some aspect of Washington's leadership that we should strive to emulate. Once again, there is nothing earth shaking here--much the same ground has been covered in such books as George Washington on Leadership or George Washington's Leadership Lessons. From Beck, we learn that we should be on time, believe in God, be willing to compromise, and not sweat the small stuff. Pretty basic stuff, really, but its always nice to have reminders.
As I said, any one of these elements could have made for an interesting book. And there are probably ways that they could have been combined together coherently to create something unique and interesting. Beck and his team, however, have simply thrown them together haphazardly with no real thought about how to give coherence to this odd collection of Washingtonian bric-a-brac. Almost everything that the book does is done much better in other (and less expensive) volumes, and the whole thing feels like uncorrelated notes that have been hastily assembled and placed between cardboard covers in time to make a Christmas killing--which, in fact, it is. The credits for Being George Washington list six different people as writers and thirteen more as "contributors & researchers." Beck himself was simply the compiler of random bits of work that other people did. And it shows.
Ultimately, what this book shows us is that Glenn Beck has ceased to be a shrill ideological firebrand and become a factory. Being George Washington was not so much written as produced on an assembly line. "Glenn Beck" (tm) is simply the brand name that guarantees book sales. I fully expect that this franchise will expand--that, in the next few years, we will see similar books on Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers. And from there: cat food, salad dressing, and beer. The good news is that the world has little to fear from Glenn Beck in the future. The bad news is that we have nothing to learn from him either.
