In the following review, Eckberg asserts that Ambrose "superbly conveys the essence" of Lewis and Clark and their famous expedition.

The 1803-1806 Lewis and Clark expedition was conceived by the young republic's most visionary president and conducted under scrupulous military organization and leadership. Launched into the unknown, its potential for marvelous discovery was tempered by an equally unsettling prospect of its unforeseeable demise. The palpable tension between these outcomes makes for a story more compellingly told in the eyewitness accounts of its participants.

Stephen E. Ambrose, author of a definitive history of D-Day, revisits this earlier military mission and superbly conveys the essence of the two men most responsible for its inception, its success, and its national repercussions. Ambrose fills a void on Meriwether Lewis unaddressed since Richard Dillon's 1965 biography, by drawing substantially on the subsequent work of expedition scholars Donald Jackson, Paul Russell Cutright, James P...