Reviewing Books on Washington, with Humor

Sarah Marshall and Amelia Laing compare David McCullogh's 1776 and Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life.  From Sarah:

Reading 1776 instead of a million-page-long biography isn't cheating, it's getting creative—just like in high school. Well, okay, maybe not exactly like high school, because I didn't just read the first 30 pages and try to base all my opinions off them. Which is why I won't spend all my time here talking about George III and the House of Commons, which is what McCullough focuses on in his first section-—a move that I love, and not just because historical House of Commons shenanigans are always entertaining. You may think the House of Lords was a party, but the House of Commons boasted the always memorable Edmund Burke—who, despite his sympathy for the Americans and his belief that England should attempt to make peace, still referred to them as "our" colonies—and Burke's brilliant, foppish protégé, Charles James Fox, who, like the smartest kid in your AP History class, never did his homework and always dazzled everyone in the room. As Britain was still reeling from its losses at Bunker Hill, Fox said of the coming war that he could not "consent to the bloody consequences of so silly a contest about so silly an object, conducted in the silliest manner that history or observation has ever furnished an instance of."....
And perhaps it's because we see the Revolutionary War in such a positive light that the Founding Fathers have become so iconic and beloved. Here is Benjamin Franklin, brilliant, soused, and slutty, flying a kite and a lightning storm with one hand and pushing a wheelbarrow through the streets of Philadelphia with the other—the Founding Fun Uncle. Here is John Adams, vinegar-lipped, articulate, uncompromising, and wise. And here is George Washington, enormous and bewigged, uniform immaculate, face hewn out of marble, the noble, flawless leader without whom the war could never have been won.
What McCullough and Chernow both do is challenge that view, both of Washington and of the war as a whole, and show them, instead, as what they were: a desolate, often miserable slog in which defeat seemed to loom at every corner, and a confused, unprepared man whose experience in war was a trial by fire—as well as ice, mud, disease, and incompetent troops.

The whole thing is humorous, but I really liked the part about Franklin.  He's by far my favorite founding father.