Probably the best book in this series I have read to date. It is quite a challenge to cover any of the presidents in approximately 150 pages. The authors have organized their material very well. I was particularly impressed by a "look back" chapter which summarized the political issues during Washington's presidency, positing three competing but not mutually exclusive attitudes toward government, the Federalist (which Washington shared), the Madisonian, and the Jeffersonian. What we have ended up with, of course, is not any one of these but an amalgam of these three different roots which played themselves out over the decades.