In this designated biography of Thomas Jefferson, best journalist and social critic Christopher Hitchens bargains a startlingly new and provocative interpretation of our Founding Father. Situating Jefferson in the context of America's evolution and tracing his legacy during the last 200 years, Hitchens brings the nature of Jefferson to existence as a guy of his time and in addition as a symbolic determine past it.

Conflicted by means of energy, Jefferson wrote the assertion of Independence and acted as Minister to France but yearned for a quieter profession within the Virginia legislature. Predicting that slavery may form the way forward for America's improvement, this professed proponent of emancipation elided the difficulty within the assertion and persisted to possess human estate. An eloquent author, he used to be an ungainly public speaker; a reluctant candidate, he left an indelible presidential legacy.

Jefferson's statesmanship enabled him to barter the Louisiana buy with France, doubling the dimensions of the country, and he licensed the Lewis and Clark excursion, establishing up the yank frontier for exploration and payment. Hitchens additionally analyzes Jefferson's dealing with of the Barbary warfare, a lesser-known bankruptcy of his political profession, while his try to finish the abduction and bribery of american citizens via the Barbary states, and the following warfare with Tripoli, resulted in the construction of the U.S. military and the fortification of America's recognition relating to nationwide defense.

In the heritage of this subtle research is a big ancient drama: the fledgling nation's fight for independence, shaped within the crucible of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in its shadow, the deformation of that fight within the excesses of the French Revolution. This crafty portrait of a formative determine and a turbulent period poses a problem to a person attracted to American heritage -- or within the ambiguities of human nature.