The RULES OF CIVILITY
The author ofFounding Father(1996 ) provides a new edition of the book of moral and social precepts that served as a guide to virtue and etiquette for the first president of the U.S. Capitalizing on the success of his glowing biography of George Washington, Brookhiser has unearthed the slim volume of rules of civilized behavior that the youthful Washington laboriously copied into a notebook. According to both his contemporaries and his biographers, Washington valued good manners and painstakingly cultivated his own brand of formal courtesy. These seemingly quaint and archaic instructions, accompanied by the editor's often humorous commentaries and illustrated with period portraits and sketches, offer some timeless suggestions on how to cope with the complexities of social discourse. A delightful browsing item as well as a representative slice of eighteenth-century etiquette.Margaret Flanagan