As featured on NPR's Weekend Edition

Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace

Edited and with a new preface by Richard Brookhiser

96 pages, 5 x 7

18 b&w illustrations

Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2218-6 • $17.95

“Brookhiser adds his own amusing afterthoughts to George Washington’s collection of behavior rules that were badly needed in the eighteenth century. Since civility is in even worse disrepair today, it’s too bad that the father of our country can’t make a return visit!”
—Letitia Baldrige

“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 . . . offer timeless suggestions on how to cope with the complexities of social discourse. . . . Delightful.”
— Booklist

As a young man, George Washington admired and copied into a little notebook 110 rules for civil behavior that originated from a Jesuit textbook. Washington took these rules very much to heart, and that handwritten list remained with him throughout his life, serving as inspiring guidance from his military days at Valley Forge and Yorktown to his two terms as president.

Guidance that at first sounds archaic, it is in fact just as relevant as—indeed, possibly more necessary than—it was nearly three hundred years ago. Richard Brookhiser makes clear the pertinence of these rules for modern readers and proposes that now more than ever we will be wise to follow the modest example of such a great man. Witty and insightful, Brookhiser’s commentary offers real-world instruction in the lost art of self-discipline, and his new preface provides a compelling and timely context in which to employ these guidelines today.

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Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of the National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer, is the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington; Alexander Hamilton, American, and America’s First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918.