Événement

Jon Meacham - Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prizewinning 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
thingswomen, his family, books, science, architecture, gardens,
friends, Monticello, and ParisJefferson 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 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France, as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham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 humanityand the genius of the new
nationlay 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.