Overall, I enjoyed this book and it's a decent introduction to the time period and the American and French Revolutions. If you are looking for an introductory book on these subjects with fast moving narrative, you should enjoy it.

However, there is an enormous lack of objectivity and the book is filled with hero worship. In celebrating the greatness of Lafayette, it at times gets tedious. For example, there are lengthy sections describing numerous banquets and parades that I found myself skipping after awhile.

Lafayette also is often cast as the hero, playing a central role in events that were much more complicated and involved numerous others who go unmentioned. This is particularly the case in the section dealing with the French Revolution. The book also tends to cast other historical figures as one dimensional -- good or evil, or relies on old stereotypes that have been, at the very least, questioned by historians. This left me questioning the book's credibility when it discussed issues I was less familiar with and I found myself cross referencing claims made by this author with other sources.

I found Mr. Unger's book exceptionally well done. It's an engrossing account of Lafayette and his remarkable wife, Adrienne courage and life. A life as fully lived as it is possible to imagine, steadfastly planted in moral ideas and courage. Lafayette led his life firmly planted in his ideals of what was right for all people and never wavered or even swayed. One of the richest men in France risked it all when he ran away as a teenager to join the American Revolution against the French King's will.

Friends with Hamilton, Wayne, Washington, Knox et all, Lafayette and times used his own money to supply his troops. He showed both courage and intelligence in battle and was even wounded at Brandywine.

Trying to bring Democracy to France after the American Revolution he was stripped of land, title and finances and thrown in jail for five years.

This book is well written, well researched and engrossing. It is an easy read and a story so interesting it was hard to put down. One of the better books I've read. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the American or French Revolutions or in famous people in history. And the reason he is famous is his steadfastness in his beliefs and his courage.

An incredible book about an incredible man who helped us to gain our independence. The Marquis de Lafayette’s role in helping us win the American Revolution should never be forgotten.

This book is AMAZING!!!!!! Lafayette is such a little known historical figure from the American and French Revolutions but he totally deserves more attention. He is one of my most admired figures in history so much so that any future child of mine should have Lafayette as a middle name. I totally recommend this book because it reads like fiction and is a page turner. It was one of the best books I have ever read and it will become one of yours as well.

Great bio. The man who tried to steer the French Revolution down a sane path. How close he came to being one of the influential luminaries of his age. He had a huge hand in swinging the American Revolution, but the fickle hand of fate smacked him down in his home country. America had a 'gentlemen s society' of hundreds, maybe thousands, who were obsessed with an orderly conducted uprising, while France had a precious few. Lafayette and France suffered for it.

Wow, this really was an engaging read. I didn't realize how little I knew about Lafayette and what an extraordinary life he led. Most impressively, this is the first book I've read that really humanized George Washington for me; his letters to Lafayette were so full of love and devotion that I could finally feel his deep capacity for emotion.

I'd like to give this 4.5 stars. Thoroughly researched but not densely written account of a fascinating person. Unger clearly loves Lafayette (which is okay, because Lafayette was great!) but sometimes that does color the account of events. Hardly an objective account of the American or French revolutions, but it does feel like an honest story of those events as they related to Lafayette and his family. In many ways, the obvious affection for Lafayette makes it feel like you're seeing those events through his eyes, or at least insofar as they affected him.

Great book about an American hero. History that was never completely explained in other books. Never knew most of the details that cover who, what and why of the American and French Revolutions. And why things turned out as they did. May be a bit one-sided, but very interesting. Easy to follow and highly recommended.

Lafayette, you are here...in this book!

This is an extremely well-written biography which just happens to be about Lafayette, and which to my extreme luck somehow came with an autograph by the author. It was a must-read in preparation for my own book about the main key to the Bastille, which Lafayette gave to George Washington. In Unger's book you'll find information you'll likely not find elsewhere. For example, you'll learn that besides his loyalty to Washington, the reason why Lafayette accepted his assignment to the troublesome, malaria-ridden southern theater in the latter stages of the American Revolution was revenge: the traitor Benedict Arnold was there as well as British General Phillips, the man that had killed Lafayette's father at the Battle of Minden. The book also outlines the major, repeat major, ways in which through his many talents -- from donations of much-needed money, to singular diplomacy, to courageous and inspired leadership on the battlefield -- Lafayette helped the American Revolution succeed. Also included are insights into why Lafayette was good at starting revolutions but not so good at finishing them in forms he would have been happy with. Regardless, you'll come to love the man. Vive Lafayette!

If the author does revise his book, I would recommend he take a look at the following: p 39. Washington was likely not 6 foot 4 inches tall, as the author describes him. Washington’s undertaker had him measured at 6 foot 3.5 inches (with toes pointing). Almost everyone else has him at 6 foot 2 inches. The author has Lafayette at 6 foot 1 inch in this book. In “The Unexpected George Washington,” the heights are reversed. p 48. The author has Washington begin soldiering in 1754 as a lieutenant colonel under General Braddock. Actually, in 1753 as a major, Washington traveled on a mission to the Ohio Valley. p. 120 The author has Benedict Arnold receiving a crippling leg wound at Quebec in 1776, which made him reluctant to assume any more battlefield commands. Actually, it was the further leg wound and his horse falling on him at Saratoga in 1777 that finally sent Arnold to noncombatant status in Philadelphia and subsequently to West Point. p 229. Maryland didn’t cede just 10 square miles for Washington, DC. Together, Maryland and Virginia together ceded 10 miles square (100 square miles). Virginia later took back its portion. p 236. 5 cannons didn’t blast through the Bastille’s outer walls. The Bastille’s governor surrendered when the attackers were about to fire at the drawbridge. The mob didn’t hang the Bastille’s governor; they decapitated him. p 240. Lafayette didn’t salvage the key from the rubble of the Bastille. It was presented to him by Brissot, a member of the city council, at Paris’ city hall. p 250. It’s questionable that the King’s troops actually trampled their revolutionary cockades. More likely it was a vicious rumor concocted by the journalist Marat to spur the Women’s March to Versailles. These issues aside, however, the book is excellent! Highly recommended by a fellow author.

This was such an engaging, fascinating read, full of personal accounts from multiple sources. The more I learn about Lafayette, the more I’m impressed by him. He’s truly an honorable historical figure, not unlike his surrogate father, George Washington. He gave so freely of himself and his fortune, and was treated so abysmally by his own country. It’s not a stretch to say that without him, America would no longer be. And yet, without him, France might still be a monarchy. He wanted for his people what he witnessed and helped create here, yet failed to understand that France was too entrenched in its own way of thinking to make such a radical shift. Couple that with the anger, and bloodthirsty desire for power wielded by Robespierre and others of his ilk, and Lafayette's dream of a “free” France was just that. A dream.

I learned so much about both the American and French Revolutions, about Lafayette and his family, the ways in which “democracy” can take a wrong turn, and especially just how many times the fate of America hung by a thread. One small decision, one arrogant act, one lucky break, was enough to turn the tide, and turn it again. While some parts of the book were on the slow side, most of it was truly an interesting read. Highly recommend.

I really never know how great a man the marquis de Lafayette was until I read this book. He later days were filled with both great revelance and sorrow which made him even more worthy of the accolade.

Some biographers need to love their subjects. I get it. But I’d much rather read a book by one who found their subjects interesting instead.

And that is why I did not like this book. For all that Lafayette’s life is lovingly drawn across the pages here, the question of what drives him is rarely raised. His inherent nobility of spirit he’d undoubtedly say. Okay. What does that mean exactly? What were his core beliefs? Liberty? Anyone with a passing knowledge of the French Revolution knows how deceptively complicated that word can be. What about his chivalric code? It’s not enough to just say the man was the last true knight; what does an 18th century knight believe in? And are there no internal contradictions in any of these values? I couldn’t help notice that Lafayette planned to murder his father’s killer in battle. Is that chivalry? If so, what else is covered by that term and how does it square with the courteous treatment meted out to other defeated enemies? If not, what does that say about Lafayette?

Basically, this book is a shallow panegyric with little to no analysis and a tediously tendentious viewpoint. Unger takes Lafayette’s side so instinctively that all the man’s enemies become his own. There’s no effort made to tell both sides of a viewpoint because St. Lafayette’s is obviously the correct one. If Lafayette was within a hundred miles of a battle or spoke at a meeting the responsibility for the (positive) outcome is his and his alone. The author also skips over or elides matters that reflect poorly upon the young marquis. For example, his charge into a Paris crowd with the National Guard killing hundreds of rioters (including women and children) is treated as a heroic spectacle when it’s a big part of what damned him in the eyes of the revolutionary movement. His grand romance with his wife ignores that he had affairs outside marriage, which it would indeed have been unusual for a young French lord not to do. And his constant refusal to seize opportunities when they fall in his lap speaks to a certain uncertainty or feeling of inadequacy. Something stopped him from living up to the astounding potential he revealed as a youth in America. Just as something kept him seeking to rekindle the revolution even after his generation of revolutionaries had grown disillusioned at the violent collapse of their dreams.

About the best thing I can say about the book is that it is filled with long quotes from Lafayette’s memoirs and letters, which means that you do get some sense of the man regardless of authorial exaggeration. I like Lafayette, for all that I dislike seeing an overblown account of him, and enjoyed hearing his views on matters of significance. And good use is made of the writings of other American patriots as well. On the other hand, there is very little attention given to French authors or letter collections.

The reason for this gross imbalance is as obvious as it is inevitable: the author was uninterested in the French Revolution (because, I imagine, it doesn’t fit his hero worship) and so did no research on it. The bibliography reveals a grand total of ONE secondary source concerning the French Revolution, and that a comparison between it and the American one. I’m hardly an expert but I’ve read more than that! As a result, we get a grossly distorted vision of events that places Lafayette at the center and dismisses anyone who differed with him, in whatever direction, as an inhuman monster. I mean, a “grotesque giant” with “an even more hideous soul” is how he describes Mirabeau, who was actually more a leader of the moderate republicans than Lafayette. And he has much worse things to say about the “psychotic” Marat and “imbecile fanatic” Robespierre.

The complete mess that this book makes of the French Revolution accounts for a lot of my anger. It’s obvious the author has no clue what’s going on, which doesn’t stop him from speaking confidently about it. Descriptions of the forces at work are simplistic and patronizing. Sometimes nonsensical. The Jacobins(!) are presented as anti-democratic and determined to punish the lower classes! This is the exact opposite of the truth. What’s so frustrating about the Revolution is that the most vicious group (the Jacobins) was the one advocating a democracy closest to what we have today. Lafayette’s moderates were all for an electorate composed of only the wealthiest citizens. No hint of that here. It’s just mob = evil, lords = greedy, Lafayette and the middle way = good/democratic. No mention either of the different and conflicting needs of the provinces/Paris, farmers/bourgeois, and peasants/landowners. Ugh.

This is a childish and lazy biography that doesn’t seek to answer any questions of motivation but merely laud a great hero. Lafayette was a hero, but he was hardly perfect and it does him an injustice to pretend he was. A man with no faults is a boring man indeed. Posing everything in moral terms makes for ugly reading. Every personal enemy of the great man must be a villain and differing viewpoints remain unexplored. Moreover, the view that this gives for the differing outcomes of Lafayette’s two revolutions is patronizing enough to be insulting: the autocratic Catholic French mob is unworthy of democracy while the noble Protestant American farmer deserves true liberty. I would not recommend this biography if you can find another covering the same subject. Something with a little more (meaning any) nuance.