Level 42 definitive biography of thomas jefferson

Lists It Appears On:. In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era.

Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Such is the art of power. For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight—and not only during his active political career.

Thomas jefferson biographies

After , his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death on July 4, ; and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity—now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety—has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person.

It includes the story of the final and most crucial phase of his secretaryship of state, his retirement to Monticello, his assumption of the leadership of the opposition party, and the crisis during the half-war with France when the existence of political expression was threatened and the freedom of individuals imperiled. In Thomas Jefferson, Bernstein offers the definitive short biography of this revered American—the first concise life in six decades.

Bernstein deftly synthesizes the massive scholarship on his subject into a swift, insightful, evenhanded account. In his riveting autobiography, Jefferson details many of the events that shaped his personal philosophy and would ultimately define his political career. This book, a National Book Award nominee in , is the life of Thomas Jefferson as seen through the prism of his love affair with Monticello.

For over half a century, it was his consuming passion, his most serious amusement. With a sure command of sources and skilled intuitive understanding of Jefferson, McLaughlin crafts and uncommon portrait of builder and building alike. It is and engaging and incisive look at the eighteenth-century mind: systematic, rational, and curious, but also playful, comfort-loving, and amusing.