Rating: 
Summary: Impressive accomplishment
Review: THOMAS JEFFERSON is an impressive accomplishment. Bernstein's masterful grasp of our third president's life and legacy allows him to peel back Jefferson's accomplishments and ambiguities layer by layer, while respecting the essential mystery at the core of his being. Generalists will hail this thorough and concise account of this multifaceted individual. Historians will appreciate Bernstein's meticulous use of source materials, his thorough familiarity with the latest scholarship, and his professional detatchment (unlike so many, this author does not obscure Jefferson with his own agenda, preferring to let his sources speak. As a wordsmith as well as an historian, I particularly relished how this book elicits one of America's gretest writers in language both incisive and elegant.
Rating: 
Summary: Good overview of Jefferson life but author stumbles
Review: Thomas Jefferson's long and accomplished life resists compression into a one volume treatment. Professor R. B Bernstein almost meets the challenge but not without some lapses. He misses the importance of Jefferson's design of the Virginia State Capitol as the introduction of classical architecture to public buildings. It was not Jefferson's influence that brought James Madison to accept the need for a bill of rights, but the opposition of Virginia and other states to the adoption of a Constitution that lacked such amendments. It was the loss of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) that caused Napoleon to give up his dream of a western empire, not the costs of maintaining the Louisiana Territory. Bernstein succumbs to the revisionist effort to create a persona for Sally Hemings in asserting she was given "extensive authority over running" Monticello.There are errors of fact which should have been caught by the readers Bernstein credits in his Acknowledgments: Eston Hemings was born in 1808, not 1809; the earliest references to the Presidents House as the White House was 1812, not at the time Jefferson moved into it; Sally Hemings never went to Ohio with her sons, but died in Charlottesville. It is disappointing to read the "proof" Bernstein, a law professor, accepts in the last chapter when he discusses whether Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings. Bernstein is one of the "believers" scattered throughout academia who have followed a pattern of making the test for paternity "could he have" rather than "did he." Two examples suffice. One, in his first term as president, the Federalist press accused Jefferson of fathering a son Tom with Hemings. A Woodson family had long claimed they are the descendants of this Tom. Although DNA tests destroyed this myth, Bernstein calls the family stories of other descendants of Sally Hemings "oral history" and insists they are "proof" of paternity. Two, Bernstein endorses a Monte Carlo simulation by an archeologist at Monticello on the "odds" that Jefferson was the cause of Hemings' conceptions. If this gibberish had any value Bernstein should take it to the racetrack. Recently, a professor at St. Joseph's University did a Monte Carlo simulation for the NCAA basketball tournament. In the round of sixteen, he got eight right. In short, not the "brilliant" biography praised on the back cover, but certainly a readable and thorough one. Just skip the last chapter.
Rating: 
Summary: Useless and bad writing
Review: Unless you know nothing about Jefferson and the period of American history in which he figured, don't think about buying this book. Don't even think of borrowing from local library.
This is a rehash that could pass as a high school review book. And the writing? Well, bad writing, I think, always reveals the shallowness of perception. Example: Bernstein's Introduction begins with the epitaph on Jefferson's cemetary stone; Bernstein follows through with a few observations and then writes: "In life, Jefferson never found the quiet that surrounds him in death." And who does? The rest of the book is even worse.
I wonder how books like this get past the first gate. It should never have been published. It's certainly not worth a glance.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Tired Repeat
Review: Whatever inspired the author to write this when there are already so many books out there about Thomas Jefferson? And, this is merely another book of opinion rather than something new resulting from bonafide historical research. These Jefferson books that are slanted negatively with no real new information are getting to be a bore. Although I'm a Jefferson buff, I'm tired of them. No need for you to make the same mistake I made. Nothing new here. This is just another tired repeat.
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