Michael,

I concur with your assessment of Richard Brookhiser. What Would the Founders Do? was thoroughly enjoyable. (John Hood liked it, too.) Brookhiser’s biography of Washington yielded plenty of interesting information.

He also avoids mincing words. In Alexander Hamilton: American (Free Press, 1999), Brookhiser explains the crux of the Maria Reynolds affair:

A plain statement of the facts is that Mrs. Reynolds was a whore, her husband was a pimp, and both were blackmailers; Hamilton was a john and a gull.