Rating: 
Summary: A must-read for the freshly diagnosed adult
Review: Autism is so confusing, the logo for it is a jigsaw puzzle. If you're an autistic person and you've just been diagnosed, it's hard to know where to begin. Comparing yourself to a list of often contradictory traits (included with this book), with no context as to how they work together, is fustrating and confusing.
Norm Ledgin does a wonderful job at explaining what autism is through taken a single example and showing how autism effected the course of his life. In doing so, he makes it easier for the autistic reader to see in what ways they are like Jefferson. This follows Norm Ledgin's own process, as it was his son's own striking similarity to Thomas Jefferson that lead to this book's creation.
As Norm Ledgin paints a picture of Jefferson through his life, it gives a sense of "place" to the autistic individual's own life. Although Jefferson's life ended on a low-point, it does show that one's autism isn't always a disability. Jefferson's skill as a writer, for example, came from his lack of speaking skill. Jefferson's sense of the fundamental equality of individuals comes from his own sense of uniqueness, and his inability to process hierarchy, so common among autistics. Norm Ledgin succeeds threefold with his book. Not only does he draw a convincing case for Jefferson's autism (something no other historian had done), he also has written an excellent primer on understanding autism, as well as a book which instills a sense of pride in the autistic reader.
Rating: 
Summary: I stand my ground.
Review: Here are some sample "eccentricities" that "only" can be explained by diagnosing Jefferson with Asperger's syndrome, along with discussions of why they can be explained easily by reference to other matters. The quotation is from Mr. Ledgin's website:"According to major biographers of Thomas Jefferson, the third president's eccentricities and contradictions included a preference for wearing old, soft clothing, often greeting visitors in slippers, a 54-year fixation with building and re-building Monticello, a penchant for exceptionally-detailed financial recordkeeping (yet he died broke), avoidance of public speaking in spite of his position, as well as Jefferson's intuitive choice of Sally Hemings (in retrospect also a logical choice) for a long-term companionship. In addition, he exhibited inner conflicts over slavery and held fiction-based notions which influenced the Declaration of Independence." His "preference for wearing old, soft clothing" turns up only in isolated examples from Sir Augustus Foster's acidulous diary of his time as British Minister to America, and in visitors' accounts of Jefferson's attire while the elderly master of Monticello. No accounts of Jefferson or of his attire from his youth, his early political career, his time in Congress, his time as governor of Virginia, or his tenure as American Minister, Secretary of State, or Vice President report such clothing. Nor do the life portraits of Jefferson. His supposed "often greeting visitors in slippers" again is a report of a single incident from the British Minister's outraged report to the Foreign Office. His "54-year fixation with building and re-building Monticello" is unusual, but it is not so unusual as to require a psychological or physiopsychological explanation. George Washington regularly built and rebuilt Mount Vernon. Indeed, the "54-year fixation" does not quite work, for Jefferson built the house in 1768-1770, did not even live there between 1784 and 1789, nor from 1790 to 1793. In 1794, he began his planned redesign and rebuilding of Monticello, which covered the next 27 years ... but, even then, one reason why the building process took so long was Jefferson's financial problems. Jefferson shared his alleged "penchant for exceptionally-detailed financial recordkeeping" with just about every Virginia planter of his time. It was essential to the lives of Virginia planters and farmers to keep detailed financial records of debts owed to them and debts they owed. Indeed, such "book debt" often took the place of cash transactions for them. Interested readers should consult Herbert E. Sloan's definitive study PRINCIPLE AND INTEREST: THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE PROBLEM OF DEBT (Columbia University Press, 1995). To be sure, Jefferson "died broke." So, however, did many other leading members of his generation, including Associate Justice James Wilson of the U.S. Supreme Court, a leading framer of the Constitution; former President James Monroe; former Senator (and Framer) Robert Morris; and Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury and the premier financial and economic thinker of his generation. Indeed, as Sloan has showed, building on the findings of T. H. Breen's TOBACCO CULTURE (Princeton University Press, 1985), Virginia planters often were one harvest away from ruin -- maybe a dang good reason, in and of itself, to practice detailed financial record-keeping. Then there's Jefferson's "avoidance of public speaking in spite of his position." He did not avoid public speaking; he was notably bad at it, as was George Washington. But he did cancel one custom -- delivering the State of the Union message in person -- substituting written messages. But we need not seek a unique psychological or psychophysiological explanation -- we need only consult Jefferson himself, who declared repeatedly that the custom of the annual Presidential speech weas a monarchical vestige that should be abolished. Note that his successors followed his decision until 1913, when Woodrow Wilson reversed the custom. As for Sally Hemings, again, as we have seen in the work of Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reed, and the 1999 symposium edited by Jan Lewis and Peter Onuf, there are ample sensible explanations for Jefferson's choice of Sally, a woman able to manage a large plantation, just as his wife Martha Wayles Jefferson had done until her death in 1782. What noted white Southern politician in this era did NOT "exhibit[] inner conflicts over slavery"? Washington did. George Mason did. James Madison and James Monroe did. John Randolph of Roanoke did. George Wythe did. John Marshall did. Indeed, it rather is interesting that Jefferson did NOT voice inner conflicts over slavery, as Peter Onuf has pointed out in JEFFERSON'S EMPIRE: THE LANGUAGE OF AMERICAN NATIONHOOD (University of Virginia Press, 2000). Finally, as Edmund Morgan has shown in INVENTING THE PEOPLE: THE RISE OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA (W.W. Norton, 1988), Jefferson was not alone in holding "fiction-based notions which influenced the Declaration of Independence." Rather, such "fiction-based notions" pervaded the political thought of the Revolutionary generation. I repeat a point that I made earlier. It is extremely hazardous to seek to explain by psychological or psychophysiological explanations unique to a historical person -- and to sufferers of a given condition that the diagnoser wants to diagnose in that historical person -- characteristics that turn out to be common or widespread among others similarly situated. I am not being arrogant nor elitist; I am simply pointing out facts. And, as John Adams once noted, "Facts are stubborn things." -- R. B. Bernstein (not Berstein), Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School
Rating:
Summary: An example of how biography can go wrong by ignoring history
Review: I agree with the reviewer who stresses how speculative and ungrounded in research this book is. The author has a perfect right to write any kind of book he wants, but he does not have a right to a chorus of uncritical praise. If he is seeking to make a contribution to historical biography, he has an obligation to live up to the scholarly rigor of the genre. As a Jefferson scholar and biographer-in-progress, I am dubious in the extreme as to the claims this book makes. (I have gone through it and I have gone through the associated website -- http://www.diagnosingjefferson.com ). This book's problems are reminiscent of the problems of writing psychohistory. Like many psychohistorians, the author treats aspects of a historical figure's (Jefferson's) life and behavior in an ahistorical fashion, generalizing as if his life and behavior should be understood purely in individualized, present-day terms, rather than in historical context. The danger of applying a modern clinical/psychological analysis to a man who was born in 1743 and died in 1826 is real. (The best example of the danger of ahistorical pigeonholing is the claim often made that Alexander Hamilton committed suicide in 1804 by taking part in the duel with Aaron Burr. This claim assumes many things that turn out not to be true of dueling in the period or of the specific duel between Hamilton and Burr -- e.g., that duelists were supposed to shoot to kill, that the purpose of a duel was to kill your opponent, etc.) I too wish that a professional historian or biographer, someone with mastery of the complex record of Jefferson's life and times, had collaborated on this book. At best, the verdict is "not proven." -- R.B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School
Rating:
Summary: An amateurish book with a personal agenda
Review: I didn't care for this book very much primarily because the book's thesis, that Thomas Jefferson suffered from Asperger's Syndrome or high-functioning autism, and written by a man whose son has Aspergers, seemed contrived and forced. Throughout the book I felt the author was searching for facts to feed his thesis rather than letting the facts speak for themselves. I don't think Thomas Jefferson's admittedly rigorous and scrupulous record keeping and so-called "bizarre behavior" rose anywhere near the standard the author of this book would have us believe it does. Jefferson was an introvert but he was nothing of the disheveled, socially awkward, odd duck, that Mr. Ledgin wants or needs him to be to fit his argument. The very publication of this book is from an odd source: Future Horizons, Inc. The web address for this publisher is listed as FutureHorizons-autism.com and I could not help but feel that this is a case of an autism-related organization claiming someone famous (in this case Thomas Jefferson) as one of their own. As history, Diagnosing Jefferson is poor and surely would have been rejected by any academic press and most trade publishing houses. There is precious little "research" in the scholarly sense; rather the footnotes are a patchwork of all of the best-known Jefferson biographies, Time Magazine, New York Times articles, and the like. The writing is not bad but is pedestrian and the author seems blinded by his own theory as he struggles to align even the most off hand contemporary observations about Jefferson's behavior with his (Ledgin's) trusty list of Asperger traits. Nevertheless, no matter how forced the diagnosis, Ledgin taunts his detractors, saying flatly that "no other conclusion" can explain Jefferson's "strange behavior." He states boastfully, "I challenge anyone to advance a better solution to the puzzle of his idiosyncratic behavior." One does not necessarily need formal credentials to write good history, and examples abound of unlettered men and women who have done so, but Norm Ledgin is not one of them. The author earned a bachelors degree in journalism and a masters in political science in the early 1950s, and lists among his occupations: editor of a weekly newspaper in Kansas, and a "traffic safety specialist" in Louisiana. All terribly interesting, but something short of the usual background for one who sets out to write a learned book about an 18th century thinker and political figure. Ledgin's portrait of Jefferson is simply unrecognizable to me as it has been to most Jefferson scholars; and as far as I know, none have endorsed his thesis. Ledgin's tone is that of a crusader not a detached historian. Like many amateur historians he exhibits a zeal and single mindedness for his subject but lacks the breadth of knowledge and training to give his passions context and balance. This isn't so much a book about Jefferson at all; it is a book about Asperger's Syndrome; therefore, if you want to understand Jefferson you will find Ledgin's polemic tedious and irrelevant.
Rating:
Summary: Personally Inspiring
Review: I don't understand where some of the critics of Mr. Ledgin's work are coming from. They overlook that he confessed at the outset he was dealing with secondary sources--principally because so many biographers seemed mystified by Jefferson's eccentric behavior. Mr. Ledgin took their observations and summed them up in the only credible way that authoritative scientific literature supports Jefferson's range of quirks--an observational conclusion of the presence of Asperger's Syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum. What seems to bother his critics most is the reference to autism, and that's because they're also overlooking the oddities of the Randolph family (Jefferson's mother's family) and failing to understand the high-to-low functioning spectrum of autism. Are they also implying autism didn't exist until modern scientists isolated and defined it, therefore Jefferson couldn't have had it? That's like accepting that the planet Earth was flat until it was proven to be round.
Rating:
Summary: Flat-earth critics?
Review: I don't understand where some of the critics of Mr. Ledgin's work are coming from. They overlook that he confessed at the outset he was dealing with secondary sources--principally because so many biographers seemed mystified by Jefferson's eccentric behavior. Mr. Ledgin took their observations and summed them up in the only credible way that authoritative scientific literature supports Jefferson's range of quirks--an observational conclusion of the presence of Asperger's Syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum. What seems to bother his critics most is the reference to autism, and that's because they're also overlooking the oddities of the Randolph family (Jefferson's mother's family) and failing to understand the high-to-low functioning spectrum of autism. Are they also implying autism didn't exist until modern scientists isolated and defined it, therefore Jefferson couldn't have had it? That's like accepting that the planet Earth was flat until it was proven to be round.
Rating: 
Summary: Diagnosising Jefferson big hit with educators
Review: I enjoyed Mr. Ledgin's book, Diagnosing Jefferson, on several levels, both as an educator who deals with students on all points of the special education continuum and as an historian. Since Thomas Jefferson has so recently been in the spotlight due to the allegations of his relationship with Sally Hemmings, it was fascinating to have a more thorough understanding of his often bizarre and unpredictable behavior and the reasons behind it. My empathy for Jefferson increased and it spurred my interest in reading more about him. For parents of children with Aspergers, Mr. Ledgin offers valuable insights on how to deal with the "system" and for the children themselves this book could not help but be a boost to their self-esteem to know that many famous people perservered despite their limitations.
Rating:
Summary: This book is an eye-opener!
Review: I learned from this book--a great deal about Thomas Jefferson and helpful information about a condition my neighbor's teenage son has been diagnosed with. Had the writer failed to document his research or if he'd shown fuzzy reasoning, I might have taken it all with a grain of salt. I asked a historian friend about some of the references, and he confirmed them. I really hadn't known how eccentric Jefferson was.
Rating:
Summary: There are genuine heros with Asperger's Syndrome
Review: I would recommend it for the serious student of Asperger's Syndrome. Parents and professionals should encourage the person with Asperger's to read this in order to recognise the value such individuals have, and have had, in our society. There are genuine heros with Asperger's Syndrome.
Rating:
Summary: Unprofessionally written and hard to read
Review: I'm a well-read parent of a child with Asperger's as well as someone who likes to read biographies. I find this one of the worst books I have ever read. The author clearly has no abilities as a biographer. The book is full of akward sentences and other editing problems with capitalization, etc. Worst of all, the claims the author makes are not substantiated. He often resorts to perspectives like, "I can't believe (a certain event) could have happened any other way." He simply uses his own opinions about how things may have happened in Jefferson's life as "proof" of Asperger's Syndrome. The book claims that the author has collaborated with "experts", but all I could see along that line was agreement from Temple Grandin and Tony Attwood that Jefferson may be on the autistic spectrum based on the author's "findings." However, they are not historical experts who can confirm biographical assumtions the author makes. I think it's quite possible that Jefferson was on the autism spectrum, but this book needs to be written by a proffesional biographer who knows how to make claims and hold the reader's attention. It's a shame, because it's such an intersting idea. I was very disapointed in this book, especially considering the cost.
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