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Title: Gentleman Revolutionary : Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution by Richard Brookhiser ISBN: 0-7432-2379-9 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Why Can't More Biographies Be Like This?
Comment: This concise, highly readable biography resurrects Gouverneur Morris, a forgotten Founding Father, who drafted the final version of the Constitution, writing its immortal preamble, and was instrumental in the development of New York into the world's greatest city, planning both the Erie Canal and the street grid of modern Manhattan. Morris was also a notable eccentric, a one-legged Lothario who shared a mistress with Talleyrand, and ultimately married a Southern lady with an unspeakable scandal in her past.
Morris was an elitist and a man of property, like his friend Alexander Hamilton. Less egalitarian than Jefferson, he was more clearsighted than the Virginian in condemning the rankness and hypocrisy of slavery. Another reviewer calls him anti-Catholic, which is untrue. He was quite critical of Catholicism, but defeated a provision in the New York state constitution banning Catholic worship. A champion of liberty of conscience, he was a Deist, like many of the Founders, and sceptical of organized religion in general.
Richard Brookhiser is a conservative commentator and editor at the National Review. However, his historical writings are as fair-minded, sensible, and free from dogma, as his journalism is not. This brief biography reflects its subject: charming, witty, and learned.
Rating: 5
Summary: Good biography
Comment: To most people who read of the era of the founding fathers, Gouverneur Morris is at best a peripheral character, mentioned in passing while the spotlight featured the bigger names of Washington, Adams, Hamilton, et al. Brookhiser gives us the opportunity to learn about this man and his role in early U.S. history.
Morris was generally a peripheral character in the Revolutionary Era, but he did play a significant role in the drafting of the Constitution. His writing skills put the Constitution into its essentially final form, and the Preamble is almost entirely his creation. Beyond this, however, he was a more minor political player.
A lot of this was by Morris's own choice, since he wasn't all that interested in higher office. He was an interesting enough person, in many ways more human than the semi-immortals with whom he worked with. Relatively easy-going and with a good sense of humor, Morris was also - despite a maimed hand and a missing leg - quite the ladies' man, even having an affair with one French woman who was not only married, but already the mistress to another. When he finally married late in life, he successfully avoided social pressure by choosing a wife with a bit of a reputation.
Brookhiser - a rather politically conservative writer - has a lot of sympathy for the Federalists such as Hamilton and Morris. He, nonetheless, has written a good, objective book, the best of the three of his I read (the other two were on Hamilton and the Adams family). While Morris is rightly accorded a lesser light in history, he does deserve some illumination and Brookhiser's book does the job well.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Good Biography, but Not One of Brookhiser's Best
Comment: Does Richard Brookhiser plan to write a biography for every single Founding Father? Based on the three books of his I've read so far (on George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and now Gouverneur Morris), one can only hope so.
Brookhiser's latest biography is of a somewhat neglected Founding Father, whose greatest accomplishment was his authorship/editorial work of much of the U.S. Constitution. Late in his life, Morris also played an invaluable, but often overlooked role in pushing the U.S. to create a system of canals linking New York State's Atlantic coast with the northern interior of North America. (These canals were, once created, as important for the young country's economic growth in the early nineteenth century as railroads would be for it in the late nineteenth century.)
For a major public figure, Morris led a balanced life. His serious pursuits did not keep him from enjoying women, travel and outings, or a well-told joke. He was a good friend, especially towards those who he felt were unfairly treated by others. As Morris would drift in and out of public service throughout his life, much of the biography focuses on this personal side of the man.
Brookhiser's skill as a biographer is to reveal aspects of his subject's character with just a well-written phrase or two. He does this in a straightforward way without the need for any conceptual baggage (such as Freudianism). Few biographers nowadays are willing to be so concise or risk interpreting their subjects in such a direct manner.
But unlike with two of his previous and better-known subjects (Washington and Hamilton), Brookhiser is perhaps too brief in dealing with Morris's life. Whereas the basic outlines of both Washington and Hamilton's lives are fairly well-known to most readers, and therefore more amenable to Brookhiser's kind of abbreviation, Morris's life is not. As a result, the transitions in Morris's life covered in the book seem to rush by and background information is uneven. This is still a fine work, one I can easily recommend, but it is not as impressive as Brookhiser's earlier biographies.
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Title: A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic by John E. Ferling ISBN: 0195159241 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: John Paul Jones : Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy by Evan Thomas ISBN: 0743205839 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 14 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: ALEXANDER HAMILTON, American by Richard Brookhiser ISBN: 0684863316 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 12 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Benjamin Franklin : An American Life by Walter Isaacson ISBN: 0684807610 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: FOUNDING FATHER by Richard Brookhiser ISBN: 0684831422 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 22 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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