Page 17 - Gears & Ears April 2015

Gears and Ears

Journal of the Rotary Club of Lake Buena Vista
Page 17
Page 17 April 2015
This Month’s Book Suggestion

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

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 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the United States, England, and France, as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham presents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.

Praise for Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power:

“This is probably the best single-volume biography of Jefferson ever written.”—Gordon S. Wood
“A big, grand, absorbing exploration of not just Jefferson and his role in history but also Jefferson the man,
humanized as never before.”—Entertainment Weekly

“[Meacham] captures who Jefferson was, not just as a statesman but as a man. . . . By the end of the book . . .
the reader is likely to feel as if he is losing a dear friend. . . . [An] absorbing tale.”—The Christian Science
Monitor

“This terrific book allows us to see the political genius of Thomas Jefferson better than we have ever seen it
before. In these endlessly fascinating pages, Jefferson emerges with such vitality that it seems as if he might
still be alive today.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin