Release date: 15th December 2012
Published by: Random House International
ISBN No: 978 1400067664
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. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both,
often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.
Thomas Jefferson hated
confrontation, and yet his understanding of power and of human nature enabled
him to move men and to marshal ideas, to learn from his mistakes, and to
prevail. Passionate about many things—women, his family, books, science,
architecture, gardens, friends, Monticello, and Paris—Jefferson loved America
most, and he strove over and over again, despite fierce opposition, to realize
his vision: the creation, survival, and success of popular government in
America. Jon Meacham lets us see Jefferson’s world as Jefferson himself saw it,
and to appreciate how Jefferson found the means to endure and win in the face of
rife partisan division, economic uncertainty, and external threat. Drawing on
archives in the United States, England, and France, as well as unpublished
Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham presents Jefferson as the most successful
political leader of the early republic, and perhaps in all of American
history.
The father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana
Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and of the settling of the West,
Jefferson recognized that the genius of humanity—and the genius of the new
nation—lay in the possibility of progress, of discovering the undiscovered and
seeking the unknown. From the writing of the Declaration of Independence to
elegant dinners in Paris and in the President’s House; from political
maneuverings in the boardinghouses and legislative halls of Philadelphia and New
York to the infant capital on the Potomac; from his complicated life at
Monticello, his breathtaking house and plantation in Virginia, to the creation
of the University of Virginia, Jefferson was central to the age. Here too is the
personal Jefferson, a man of appetite, sensuality, and passion.
The
Jefferson story resonates today not least because he led his nation through
ferocious partisanship and cultural warfare amid economic change and external
threats, and also because he embodies an eternal drama, the struggle of the
leadership of a nation to achieve greatness in a difficult and confounding
world.
Copyright: Amazon Synopsis
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