Meacham has read the scholarly literature on Jefferson-some of it critical-but doesn’t let enough of this debate intrude on the storytelling, which nearly always puts Jefferson in the best possible light.Įarly in the book, Meacham shows that he has fallen under the Jeffersonian spell. There is some meat in the book, but finding it requires dexterity and doggedness-checking the endnotes after every ten pages or so to see what is missing from the passing panorama. But Meacham has chosen storytelling over analysis, offering up a genial but meandering narrative.

Since Jefferson is generally perceived more as a philosopher-king than a Tammany pol, such an examination, coming from a highly regarded biographer and political commentator, should yield fresh insights into the Sphinx. (Nov.THE SUBTITLE OF Jon Meacham’s massive new life of Thomas Jefferson promises a probing exploration of how-he-did-it-the ways and means of power politics. Jefferson’s critics still have something valid to say, even if their voices here are stilled. But in the end, as fine a rendering of the nation’s third president as this book may be, it comes too close to idolization. Meacham understandably holds Jefferson up as the remarkable figure he was.

While he’s fully conversant with long-held skepticism about aspects of Jefferson’s character (his dissimulation, for instance) and his stance toward slavery, Meacham gives him the benefit of the doubt throughout (on, for example, his Revolutionary War governorship of Virginia and the draconian 1807 embargo). To Meacham, who won a Pulitzer for his American Lion, Jefferson was a philosopher/politician, and “the most successful political figure of the first half century of the American republic.” Those words only faintly suggest the inspirational tone of the entire work. Bernstein’s Thomas Jefferson. Like David McCullough’s John Adams (to which it can be seen as a counterpart), Meacham’s book is a love letter to its subject.

Another Jefferson biography (right on the heels of Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain)! Fortunately, Meacham’s is a fine work, deserving a place high on the list of long biographies of its subject even if rivaled by such shorter ones as Richard B.

Thomas jefferson by jon meacham