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. and its exhibited at its finest in Edward Herrmanns skilled reading of Jon Meachams biography of Americas third president.
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