Rating: 
Summary: Thoughtful analysis
Review: Upon visiting Monticello last spring, I became fasinated with Thomas Jefferson. This is the first biography that I picked up and it has proven to be a most worthwhile read. While Brodie's psychoanalysis can get a bit tiring (she tries to support her claim that Jefferson was involved with Sally Hemmings in Paris by citing his overusage of the word "mullato" in his travel diary descriptions of the german landscape), she has done a tremendous service by denying the myth of Jefferson as a retiring hermit. Pointing out the tendency of earlier Jefferson biographers to vehemently deny the possiblity of an intense love affair after the death of Martha Jefferson, she goes on to make a clear case for the gravity of his relationship with Maria Cosway in Paris. People who wish to focus all of their attacks on Brodie's treatment of the Jefferson-Hemmings affair fail to recognize that this was of matter was of secondary importance. Brodie's primary attempt is successful, she paints a sensitive portrait of Thomas Jefferson as a person rather than a statesman. Certainly, her conjecture leads her to inappropriate and almost certainly incorrect conclusions at times, but this type of biography is all about drawing judgements from old documents without the benefit of truly knowing the individual. While more circumspect biographers may produce a book which is more historically defensible, they cannot attempt to uncover the person behind the image. I enjoyed Brodie's suggestions and appreciate what I consider to be a successful attempt at a intimate and infinitely readable biography.
Rating: 
Summary: unengaging psychohistory
Review: You take your expectations to a book, and this one badly missed the mark for what I was looking for. Rather than a portrait of TJ that delved into how his personality influenced his political life and choices, this is purely about his psychological makeup. It has very little about the times and context he lived in, which left me quite bored. Instead, the reader is treated to the debate on his relationship with the slave woman who bore him so many children, what impact the loss of his wife had on him, etc. Indeed, I was looking for something on the level of Young Man Luther by Eriksen, and this falls so short of that mark that it is awful by comparison. As such, you have all of the flaws of psychohistory - that we can never really understand someone's psychological makeup who is long dead - and yet none of the advantages of Eriksen's approach, which did treat the historical context while being so splendidly evocative about life in general. Brodie apparently just doesn't have that kind of depth. Recommended only as a useful perspective for specialists who might benefit from this kind of speculative enterprise. I do not believe that many general readers who want to know about TJ's life and times would enjoy this.
Rating:
Summary: unengaging psychohistory
Review: You take your expectations to a book, and this one badly missed the mark for what I was looking for. Rather than a portrait of TJ that delved into how his personality influenced his political life and choices, this is purely about his psychological makeup. It has very little about the times and context he lived in, which left me quite bored. Instead, the reader is treated to the debate on his relationship with the slave woman who bore him so many children, what impact the loss of his wife had on him, etc. Indeed, I was looking for something on the level of Young Man Luther by Eriksen, and this falls so short of that mark that it is awful by comparison. As such, you have all of the flaws of psychohistory - that we can never really understand someone's psychological makeup who is long dead - and yet none of the advantages of Eriksen's approach, which did treat the historical context while being so splendidly evocative about life in general. Brodie apparently just doesn't have that kind of depth. Recommended only as a useful perspective for specialists who might benefit from this kind of speculative enterprise. I do not believe that many general readers who want to know about TJ's life and times would enjoy this.
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