Summary of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

I began reading this book simply because, somehow, while I'd already read biographies of most of the Presidents - and many of some of them - I had somehow overlooked Mr. Jefferson. This book is not a hagiography - it acknowledges and discusses Jefferson's flaws - but it does something very valuable in how it gets across Jefferson's point of view. As someone schooled in the modern trend I popular writings about the Founding era, and who is more ideologically sympathetic to early Federalism than Republicanism, I had always bought into the caricature of Jefferson as the impractical dreamer and considered some of his antipathy towards his opponents in the 1790s and 1800s as basically irrational. This biography, by telling Jefferson's story in a plain and unadorned fashion, disabused me of such notions.