![[Sneak Peeks]](../../banners/sneaks.gif)
All titles may not be immediately available.
RECENT REVIEWS:
2/19/97:
2/18/97:
2/17/97:
2/14/97:
2/13/97:
SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: |
By Joseph J. Ellis, william Jefferson Clinton celebrated his second inaugural with an authentic Jeffersonian dinner. There are good reasons for the current president to feel a certain affinity for Thomas Jefferson, besides his love of apple bread pudding and the fortuitous fact of his middle name. Jefferson was, as Clinton is, a hard man to pin down -- a true American Sphinx, as biographer Joseph J. Ellis terms him. As Ellis notes in his compelling new biography of the third president, Jefferson was a man of "disarming ideological promiscuity," given to vague but inspiring rhetoric that has, over the years, been appropriated by radical populists and government-hating plutocrats alike. And, like Clinton, Jefferson too was the object of persistent sexual rumors and accusations -- in particular, that he had fathered several children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. Jefferson managed to survive these all-too-believable-if-never-quite-proven accusations with his reputation more or less intact. We don't quite know how well the current president will do when he faces off at last against his own personal devil, Paula Jones. Ellis' biography of Jefferson is an ambitious effort, an attempt to come to terms with the elusive character of a man who has baffled generations of historians. He avoids the reductionist rhetoric of those who have in recent years dismissed Jefferson as a mere hypocrite -- a man whose talk of liberty was rendered all but absurd by the fact of his owning slaves. Instead, Ellis presents a subtle portrait of a complex and often contradictory man: a fierce democrat who surrounded himself with aristocratic opulence, a passionate writer who was hesitant in speech. Elegantly written and carefully argued, "American Sphinx" is a model biography, one that conveys with subtlety and grace what we do know, what we can guess about and what, finally, we can never learn about a man whose life was critical to our country's very existence.
How relevant is Jefferson's vision today? In purely practical terms, not much, though his rhetoric certainly is.
Jefferson's vision of a decentralized agrarian society with minimal government isn't even appealing to most farmers today (dependent as they are on massive subsidies).
But Jefferson wasn't a practical man. "The genius of his vision is to propose that our deepest yearnings for personal freedom are in fact attainable," Ellis writes. "The genius of his rhetoric is to articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness ... The Jeffersonian magic works because we permit it to function at a rarefied region where real-life choices do not have to be made." In this, Jefferson is the perfect role model for a president who prefers campaigning to governing, who is expert, above all, at telling people just what they want to hear.
|
AMERICAN SPHINX: