Despite minor flaws, Jefferson’s Demons manifests high energy, expansive scholarship, and fluid language.
An examination of Jefferson’s career with attention to his psychological states, his debates with his inner voices, and his struggles with Federalist adversaries.
Lawyer/writer Beran (The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy, 1998) has an efflorescent style that sometimes charms, sometimes cloys (he’s especially fond of alliteration), but he says many striking things about Jefferson, the man and the politician. Jefferson’s greatest productivity often followed hard upon headachy periods of ennui, the author argues, but he establishes little beyond an interesting correlation. Beran divides his treatment into four seasonal sections, beginning with spring and ending with winter, and swiftly deals with the superficial biographical facts. Slavery is a consistent motif, and the author generally does well to point out—repeatedly—Jefferson’s failure to liberate people at Monticello as he simultaneously called for the liberation of people in general. (He is reluctant to believe that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’s children and appears to think that a master’s sexual relations with a slave could be something other than rape.) In his sprightly style, Beran takes us to familiar biographical landmarks: the Declaration of Independence, the death of Martha Jefferson, the sojourn in France, the Grand Tour, the battles with Hamilton, the decline of Aaron Burr, the two presidential terms (he characterizes both inaugural addresses as dull), the University of Virginia, the now-and-then intimacy with John Adams, and death. He also deals quite effectively with the troubling contradictions in Jefferson, a democrat who lived like an aristocrat (fine wine, fine food, fine first editions, high debts), a man versed in classical ethics who tried to purge the Supreme Court of his political enemies, a true believer in the Constitution who stepped outside its boundaries to enlarge those of the US with the purchase of Louisiana. A particularly intriguing chapter describes interior conversations among various portions of Jefferson’s mind.
Despite minor flaws, Jefferson’s Demons manifests high energy, expansive scholarship, and fluid language.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3279-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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