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I am not afraid to go.” He is buried at Mount Vernon.
    George Washington was born to an era of great and visionary men—Cook, Franklin, Burke, Nelson, Wilberforce, Jefferson, Wellington—but he stands with them equally. When the news of his death reached Britain, his former protagonist, the Royal Navy, fired a salute to him of twenty guns—just one less than for the monarch.
    At the time of his death, Americans considered George Washington cold and indomitable, a steadfast man of war rather than of peace. Yet the modern republic he helped found, in those first precarious and unstable years of peace, has lasted longer than any other republic in the world. The shadow of his spirit crosses the centuries to the present day.
    In the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge once swung around in his chair and looked through the windows of the Oval Office at the Washington Monument. “He’s still there,” that president commented. So he is, another hundred years later.
    Recommended
    Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation by Richard Smith
    Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson
    The Life of George Washington by Jared Sparks et al.
    USS Constitution, Naval Shipyard, Boston, Massachusetts
    Mount Vernon Estate, Virginia
    Sulgrave Manor, Sulgrave, Northamptonshire, U.K.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes
    T hrough obsession, daring and sheer talent, the men and women in this book often achieved extraordinary things. They saved India, escaped from Colditz, climbed Everest, and even defeated Napoléon. There is a reason for including such lives that goes beyond a collection of “ripping yarns from history.” In this day and age, it is all too easy to become mired in paying the mortgage, getting promoted, filling the hours with hobbies and anything else we can find. There is a place for such things, of course—we cannot all climb Everest.
    When disaster strikes, each of us is capable of courage and quiet dignity. Yet somehow, it is harder without these stories and others like them. Men and women alike take strength from the courage of Edith Cavell or the insane recklessness of Teddy Roosevelt or, indeed, Ranulph Fiennes. Put simply, their lives help us to endure the hard times. As Prince Charles once said: “My admiration for Ranulph Fiennes is unbounded and thank God he exists. The world would be a far duller place without him.”
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    Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes was born in Windsor on March 7, 1944. His father commanded the Royal Scots Greys Regiment in World War II and died without seeing his son. In fact, Ranulph Fiennes’s first claim to fame was being the youngest posthumous baronet in existence.

    Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid
    His first years were spent in South Africa, in idyllic surroundings. He ran around with a gang of local lads, sometimes carrying bamboo spears. They took turns throwing them at one another, protected by a trash-can lid.
    In 1952, Ranulph was sent as a boarder to Western Province Preparatory School. When he won the divinity prize, he was so pleased he decided briefly to become a priest. That dream fell to pieces when he was taken to see a film on the ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. Given the man he became, it is not fanciful to suggest that the film shaped his life.
    The following year his mother took the family home to England, drab and gray to a boy who had known the sun of South Africa. She rented a small cottage, and he was sent to board at Sandroyd School near Salisbury. After a miserable start, he grew to love his time there, though mathematics was always a particular challenge. He found that his classmates would listen to stories based in South Africa, and he charged them squares of chocolate to hear them. He formed a gang named the Acnuleps (Latin for cave spelled backward), who signed their rules in blood, as boys tend to do. They went on to fight another gang,