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Title: Jefferson's Demons : Portrait of a Restless Mind by Michael Knox Beran ISBN: 0-7432-3279-8 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 07 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A SOMEWHAT LIMITED, BUT TOTALLY UNIQUE BIOGRAPHY . . .
Comment: _____________________________________________________________________________
I really enjoyed this biography of Thomas Jefferson - the book itself. My overall impression is altered somewhat by the added dimension of having listened rather than read . . . I bought the CD version because of the many hours I spend on the road. Dan Cashman, the narrator, has a splendid voice, but I felt his reading was too slow and with too many poignant pauses for my taste. I would have liked the audio version more if he'd been more straight-forward in its reading with less tendency to pontificate. Be that as it may, the substance of the book itself opened up the world of it's protagonist in a way few books do.
Although the book meanders a bit at certain points, the reader feels he is in Jefferson's mind at times. I would have liked the author to have told us about more of Jefferson's close acquaintances and their relationships. Few of the other founding fathers are mentioned, Benjamin Franklin a case in point. Attention given to Washington and Adams is quite sparse. I felt too many pages were devoted to Jefferson's lopsided relationship with Maria Cosway whom he met after the premature death of his wife. Maria was a married woman he was romantically attracted to, but who would have nothing to do with him except as a friend. He couldn't let go of her over the years, however, and she was too polite to totally cut all communications (even though she lived in Europe and ended up becoming a nun).
One thing I liked about this book was the way Beran shed light on Jefferson's intimate interests, his way of looking at the world around him and the place he felt he occupied in it. Some of those interests and notions, or ways, of looking at people, places, his own personal psyche and health (among other things) seem alien to us today. But that is what's wonderful about how Beran puts it all together - in a way you can almost taste Jefferson's time, what was important to people and what they found motivating (people, at least, who were of the station and caliber of Jefferson - a rarity to be sure). Many of Jefferson's fears, shortcomings and idiosyncrasies are also covered, but in an affectionate way which makes him seem more human and less aloof.
I was pleasantly surprised and gratified to find that Jefferson appeared to become more disposed to the teachings of Christ later in his life, considering him the greatest teacher of the virtues of pure love who ever lived. Beran indicates that Jefferson came to believe Christ's teachings transcended those of the Greek philosophers in that Christ applied them across the board to all peoples. Jefferson even wrote a singular treatise on the subject, this after having held a largely hellenistic view of the world for most of his life.
I finished the book feeling I would have liked to have known Jefferson personally and been able to have conversed and debated with him as a friend. My reason for awarding the book only 4 stars rather than 5 is largely due to my disappointment in the audio version - If I were you I'd opt for paper.
Rating: 5
Summary: How Thomas Jefferson Can Change Your Life
Comment: This book is a Bildungsroman: the Education of Thomas Jefferson. It's the story of how Jefferson struggled to form himself into a man capable of action--the story of his "paideia," as the author would have it, in a bow to his subject's lifelong love of the Greeks. JEFFERSON'S DEMONS describes the mysterious ways the Sage of Monticello educated himself and learned to tap his most profound creative instincts.
Like so many great men, Jefferson was engaged in an ongoing conversation with the great men of the past, with Montaigne, Homer, Solon, Tacitus, Milton, Isaiah, Socrates, Jesus. Beran lets the reader overhear these conversations, and he shows us how Jefferson drew on them both in his private life and his public work.
The author's richly allusive style is itself an instrument in the communication of his vision of Jefferson: there are passages in the book in which the prose has less affinity with the rhytmically and spiritually flat prose of the present than with that of the Caroline and late Elizabethan prose-stylists. This startling use of language and metaphor prepares the reader for the book's major reassessments of whole tracts of Jefferson's thought. The book provides a nuanced reading of Jefferson's "Whig" and "Tory" qualities, shows how deeply immersed Jefferson was in a Virginia culture of decadent feudalism, and contains an ingenious reading of the connection between Jefferson's "sentimentalism" and the mediaeval romance of the rose. Jefferson's architecture emerges as something more deeply felt than the pasteboard classicism it is often taken to be; and Beran ties his analysis of Monticello and the University of Virginia to his discussion of how Jefferson tried to reconcile his civic republican ideals (the communitarianism of the classical city-state, the Greek polis) with his commitment to Whig liberalism, with its emphasis on liberty of trade, liberty of the press, and liberty of conscience.
I loved this book. It's a splendid account of Jefferson's self-culture and his attempts to apply the lessons he learned in the young American Republic, and it enlarges the number of intellectual debates in which Jefferson participated and through which he must examined.
But the book's most important message is an intensely personal one. Jefferson spoke hopefully of the "progress to be made under our democratic stimulants until every American is potentially an athlete in body and an Aristotle in mind." Beran shows the reader how Jefferson, in trying to realize this potentiality in himself and in others, aspired to the Greek ideal of the statesman who is also an educator, one who can help people to know themslves and do their work.
Rating: 5
Summary: Stripped Bare: TJ's Heart of Darkness
Comment: I bought this book after reading the review in "The Wall Street Journal," which praised it as a "profound and exquisitely written meditation on the mind of America's most enigmatic Founder." I was skeptical at first; I did not want to read another study in what is sometimes called "pathography." But the book overcame my skepticism. The writing style is, I think, very fine, and owes something to the mandarin tradition exemplified by Lytton Strachey and Sir Thomas Browne. But what impressed me most about "Jefferson's Demons" was the complexity of the personality the author reveals in his protagonist. When I was in graduate school I read F.O. Matthiessen's classic study, "American Renaissance," in which Matthiessen argued that "notwithstanding the humaneness and toleration that made Franklin and Jefferson among the strongest bulwarks in our social heritage, it is forced inescapably upon us that their rationalism was too shallow to encompass the full complexity of man's nature." "Jefferson's Demons" makes a strong case that historians have misread Jefferson's "rationalism," and in especial have failed to do justice to the daemonic qualities in his neo-classical architecture. Jefferson was not as "shallow" as Matthiessen and others have supposed. He is interesting precisely because, as this book demonstrates, he is not a caricature of an Enlightened sage, a plaster-work Voltaire. Whether the Conradian nightmare described on page 250 of the book -- the accusation that Jefferson was once seen "FLOGGING IN THE MOST BRUTAL MANNER A NEGRO WOMAN" -- is true or not I can't pretend to say; but certainly Jefferson was more familiar with human nature's dark side than we've been led to believe. In any event "Jefferson's Demons" is a profound and brilliant book, and I am grateful for it; it is, I think, a classic of its kind.
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Title: "Negro President" : Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills ISBN: 0618343989 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek ISBN: 0374175268 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 15 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Thomas Jefferson by R. B. Bernstein ISBN: 0195169115 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow ISBN: 1594200092 Publisher: The Penguin Press Pub. Date: 26 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson by Gore Vidal ISBN: 0300101716 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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