Leaders & Notable People Books - Page 11

MagicBeanDip.com

Subcategories:

Page 11 of 200 - Go to page: 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 22

Autobiography of a Yogi: with bonus CD

Paramahansa Yogananda

Autobiography of a Yogi: with bonus CD Paramahansa Yogananda Amazon Price: $10.00
List Price: $12.50
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Self-Realization Fellowship
Amazon Marketplace: 59 new & used starting at $6.22

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Religious
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 219 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Autobiography of a Yogi is at once a beautifully written account of an exceptional life and a profound introduction to the ancient science of Yoga and its time-honored tradition of meditation. This acclaimed autobiography presents a fascinating portrait of one of the great spiritual figures of our time. With engaging candor, eloquence, and wit, Paramahansa Yogananda tells the inspiring chronicle of his life: the experiences of his remarkable childhood, encounter with many saints and sages during his youthful search throughout India for an illumined teacher, ten years of training in the hermitage of a revered yoga master, and the thirty years that he lived and taught in America. Also recorded here are his meetings with Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Luther Burbank, the Catholic stigmatist Therese Neumann, and other celebrated spiritual personalities of East and West. The author clearly explains the subtle but definite laws behind both the ordinary events of everyday life and the extraordinary events commonly termed miracles. His absorbing life story becomes the background for a penetrating and unforgettable look at the ultimate mysteries of human existence. Selected as "One of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century," Autobiography of a Yogi has been translated into 20 languages, and is regarded worldwide as a classic of religious literature. Several million copies have been sold, and it continues to appear on best-seller lists after more than sixty consecutive years in print. Profoundly inspiring, it is at the same time vastly entertaining, warmly humorous and filled with extraordinary personages. Self-Realization Fellowship's editions, and none others, include extensive material added by the author after the first edition was published, including a final chapter on the closing years of his life.

A bonus audio CD is included, featuring the first four chapters of the full audio-book (also available from Self-Realization Fellowship), as narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley.

Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope

Don & Susie Van Ryn, Newell, Colleen & Whitney Cerak

Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope Don & Susie Van Ryn, Newell, Colleen & Whitney Cerak Amazon Price: $14.95
List Price: $21.99
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Howard Books
Amazon Marketplace: 137 new & used starting at $3.94

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Religious
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 130 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Four and a half stars -- not great literature, but an amazing compelling story 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Believe it or not, I came to this book through a TV show. What's really ironic about that is I don't even have TV. My boyfriend and I run a bookstore, and most of our time, energy, and focus is caught up with books and the day-to-day needs of our business. Why bother paying for TV when most of it is junk, and we don't have time anyway? We do, however, like "House", and so we rent the DVDs. I saw an episode from Season 4 -- I believe it was the opening episode -- about two young women who worked in an office building that collapsed. I won't give everything away, but suffice it to say, their identities were mixed up. I talked to a friend about how much that episode touched me, stayed with me, had me reflecting on it for days. She suggested this book.

The story seems unbelieveable, as many people have said -- more like a storyline for a TV show or a movie than something that could really happen in real life.

I hate to join in the "circus-for-free" syndrome that we seem to have, almost helpless to turn our eyes away from the accident scene, the smoke pouring out the windows of the burning building, the crumbled buildings and bodies left in the wake of the latest disaster shown on the news. Nevertheless, this story was so compelling. I had to known more about what transpired, what the families went through, how the mix-up happened. I believe and respect that the only reason these families agreed to write their blog, do some media interviews, and eventually do this book was the opportunity to share their faith.

I grew up in the church, but I have often stayed on the perimeter, uncomfortable with so many things done and said in the name of Christianity. I am often uncomfortable with stories as heavily evangelical as this. In this case, I was so proud of the Van Ryns and the Ceraks. They are living their faith, and sharing it beyond "the shadow of the valley of Death", being content in all things because of the One who strengthens them, tested like Job. I was not "turned off" this story by how much they told it by faith. I was deeply touched.

Editorial Review:

Meet Laura Van Ryn and Whitney Cerak: one buried under the wrong name, one in a coma and being cared for by the wrong family.

This shocking case of mistaken identity stunned the country and made national news. Would it destroy a family? Shatter their faith? Push two families into bitterness, resentment, and guilt?

Read this unprecedented story of two traumatized families who describe their ordeal and explore the bond sustaining and uniting them as they deal with their bizarre reversal of life lost and life found.

And join Whitney Cerak, the sole surviving student, as she comes to terms with her new identity, forever altered, yet on the brink of new beginnings.

Mistaken Identity weaves a complex tale of honesty, vulnerability, loss, hope, faith, and love in the face of one of the strangest twists of circumstances imaginable.

Speaking for Myself: My Life from Liverpool to Downing Street

Cherie Blair

Speaking for Myself: My Life from Liverpool to Downing Street Cherie Blair Amazon Price: $19.80
List Price: $30.00
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Little, Brown and Company
Amazon Marketplace: 47 new & used starting at $15.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Political
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> Women

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Even if she hadn't married Tony Blair, Cherie'sstory would have been amazing. Abandoned by her actorfather, she overcame obstacles to become one of the UK's most successful barristers. But when Labour took power in 1997, she faced new challenges: her husband was the first Prime Minister in recent history with a young family, and Cherie was the first PM's wife with a serious career.


Now, she gives a complete account of her own life--an astonishing journey for a woman whose unconventional childhood was full of drama and who grew up with a fierce sense of justice. In her autobiography she reveals for the first time what it was like to combine life as a working mother with life married to the Prime Minister. She writes about her encounters with scores of foreign leaders and her friendships with Presidents Clinton and Bush, as well as with Hillary and Laura. And she offers inside details of her relationships with the royals, including Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana.

House to House

David Bellavia

House to House David Bellavia Amazon Price: $17.16
List Price: $26.00
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Free Press
Amazon Marketplace: 69 new & used starting at $3.90

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Military -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Military -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 145 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Blood flows over my left hand and I lose my grip on his hair. His head snaps back against the floor. In an instant, his fists are pummeling me. I rock from his counterblows. He lands one on my injured jaw and the pain nearly blinds me. He connects with my nose, and blood and snot pour down my throat. I spit blood between my teeth and scream with him. The two of us sound like caged dogs locked in a death match. We are."

On the night of November 10, 2004, a U.S. Army infantry squad under Staff Sergeant David Bellavia entered the heart of the city of Fallujah and plunged into one of the most sustained and savage urban battles in the history of American men at arms.

With Third Platoon, Alpha Company, part of the Army's Task Force 2/2, Bellavia and his men confronted an enemy who had had weeks to prepare, booby-trapping houses, arranging ambushes, rigging entire city blocks as explosives-laden kill zones, and even stocking up on atropine, a steroid that pumps up fighters in the equivalent of a long-lasting crack high. Entering one house, alone, Bellavia faced the fight of his life against six insurgents, using every weapon at his disposal, including a knife. It is the stuff of legend and the chief reason he is one of the great heroes of the Iraq War.

Bringing to searing life the terrifying intimacy of hand-to-hand infantry combat, House to House is far more than just another war story. Populated by an indelibly drawn cast of characters, from a fearless corporal who happens to be a Bush-hating liberal to an inspirational sergeant-major who became the author's own lost father figure, it develops the intensely close relationships that form between soldiers under fire. Their friendships, tested in brutal combat, would never be quite the same. Not all of them would make it out of the city alive. What happened to them in their bloody embrace with America's most implacable enemy is a harrowing, unforgettable story of triumph, tragedy, and the resiliency of the human spirit.

A timeless portrait of the U.S. infantryman's courage, House to House is a soldier's memoir that is destined to rank with the finest personal accounts of men at war.

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

James W. Douglass

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters James W. Douglass Amazon Price: $19.80
List Price: $30.00
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Orbis Books
Amazon Marketplace: 38 new & used starting at $17.80

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Presidents & Heads of State
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> People, A-Z -> ( K ) -> Kennedy, John F.
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Could be the start of American Enlightenment Period 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Book review, by Mike Palecek

JFK And The Unspeakable

By James W. Douglass

Orbis Books, 2008





I waited my whole life to read James W. Douglass' new book, "JFK And The Unspeakable."

The wait was not worth it.

I should not have had to wait, at all.

This is supposed to be America, but it is not.

That is why I was made to wait.

Americans should not have to wait.

We like to have it right now. We want what we want when we want it.

Now.

Please.



Sister Ellen walked into our third grade classroom, hands tucked neatly into the opposite brown sleeve.

She was the principal at Sacred Heart elementary, and she only came to the classrooms to announce that the poorest kid in our class and his large family had run off a bridge this morning on the way to school, or lead us down to the gym for the Christmas movie and extra chocolate milk.

So on Nov. 22, 1963, when lean, tall, straight Ellen floated in just after lunch recess -- pre-Vatican II sisters had no feet, legs, arms, no hair -- we saw the Franciscan specter of death.

Later, Mom ironed while she watched the caisson and "Black Jack," the riderless horse, on the black and white television in the front room.

This was Norfolk, Nebraska.

The Norfolk Daily News and WJAG told us it was Oswald. We just assumed, along with the Omaha World-Herald, that the Warren Commission had been commissioned by God.

Hometown hero Johnny Carson grilled an actual hero, attorney Jim Garrison, because Garrison had the gall to think for himself.

Then followed days and decades of lies.

My mother and I watched out the back door at the turn of the `70s, toward the railroad track, to see if Dad might go past, while grandma Josie sat in her room in the dark, afraid to speak at all.

My dad died to open the `80s, the day before Ruth and I were married.

Football on TV, and lies.

Pot roast on Sunday, with lies.

Turkey and dressing for Thanksgiving. White lies? Dark lies?

Most recently Peter Jennings and ABC News felt the need to cement the lies some forty years after the Kennedy coup.

The program includes a computer-generated reconstruction of the shooting that confirms that Oswald was the lone gunman. And it finds no persuasive evidence of a conspiracy to kill the president.

Through it all, through the fog of American cultural propaganda, some persisted, some wanted the truth, some like Oliver Stone in "JFK" in 1991, hit hard enough to make the ground quiver for a moment, crack in some places.

But the cracks were quickly filled by volunteers with footballs, turkey, dressing, cranberries, credulity.



Now comes James W. Douglass, long-time peace activist, professor, Catholic Worker.

Why is his book the one I've been waiting for?

Maybe it's because of the flood of new information, at least new to me.

Maybe it's the way Douglass lays it out, on the line, straight and true, brick by brick, looking us in the eye and telling us it was the CIA who killed John F. Kennedy.

And that it was because of money.

Of course.

Is there something else?



I'm not an assassination expert.

I am an expert in living in America.

I am a Ph.D in suffering through America, its propaganda, its holiday dinners, football afternoons, coffee conversations, newspaper articles, television news shows, entertainment shows.

If there were one thing worth listening to or hearing out of all those, there would be no need to excuse oneself to go stand in the garage smoking hidden cigarettes, holding the knife at your neck, then putting the cigarettes back into the hiding spot and the knife as well, and going back, to try once more to think and live and act as an American.

I happen to hold several advanced degrees in American Culture -- years and decades spent sitting in comfortable chairs wearing new Christmas pajamas, balancing a Jethro Bowl of cherry black walnut ice cream in my lap, seeking enlightenment by watching Johnny Carson, Don Rickles, Dean Martin, Ed McMahon.

And then going to bed convinced beyond any reasonable doubt there is nothing more.

This is what there is.

This is life.

All there is to see and know is what I can see in my peripheral vision while watching Big Red Football, Gunsmoke, Mayberry RFD, Happy Days, Survivor.

That is all our Norfolk High School "U.S. History" books, all my parents, Isabel and Milosh, the parish priests, mailman have to tell us.

They were my Socrates and I was their Plato, and in our daily discourse I learned not to ask certain questions.

Over the years and decades I had it drilled into me the beauty and wonderment and majesty that the rain was good for the farmers and that it would get cold again this winter.

In the Athens that I imagined Norfolk to be, with its Central Park band pavilion and its "world's largest stockyard," which was also a lie, I learned not to learn.



But now ... an unknown stone falls from the sky.

Well ... someone pick it up.

What's this?

There is more?

A lot more.



The land of the free and the home of the brave murders its own presidents when they threaten the men with the money, like the ones who contributed to the schools we grew up in and the newspapers and the ...

Oh, my.

The amber waves of grain will roll right over you, your children, your house if you stand in their path in any meaningful way.

Murder, Inc.

The business of America is business.

To protect and to serve.

We will kill you and you and your sons and daughters, grandmothers to get what we want.

What we want is to eat and watch television in the dark.



While we grow wrinkles trying to figure out two plus two, those who have made that their profession, manipulate ... everything.

We vote and we work and we study and we worry about our children having Ho Ho's in their lunchbox and friends on the bus.

And we pay money earned on our knees to hire men and women to kill leaders and overthrow governments to make more money for those who built our schools and run our newspapers, and ...

And if those people also decide that our president should die, then we can do that too.

And we pay to have that done. Like having the carpet cleaned, the lawn mowed, the oil changed.

And no newspaper or radio station or TV station will ever talk about it.

Unless telling us that it never happened.

And we will believe them.

Because not believing them means figuring out something else to believe.

And we have things to do. We have lives ... to live.



And those lives mean nothing, less than nothing, because they are built, constructed ... days laid down unevenly, brick by brick ... on lies and murder.

Lies. Murder.

Lies. Killing.

Lies. Death.

And it goes on and on as if it will never stop.



And then one unexpected day, along comes a brave man, like those brave men murdered, who is not like the weak men with the lies.

And everything changes.

A revolution without guns.

A cultural revolution, an undelicate purging of turkey and cranberries, a detoxification.

A new enlightenment, like the one that spawned the men who made this country -- that the recent men have destroyed.



And the time does not seem quite so long.

Then and now are connected. Brought together.

Come together.

And now maybe.

Maybe our children will not live within lies, houses of lies, schools of lies, lives of lies.

Just maybe.

Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends

William "Wild Bill" Guarnere, Edward "Babe" Heffron, Robyn Post

Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends William Amazon Price: $10.88
List Price: $16.00
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Berkley Trade
Amazon Marketplace: 58 new & used starting at $3.98

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Military -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Military -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Military & Spies

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Tom Hanks introduces the “remarkable”(Publishers Weekly) story of two inseparable friends and soldiers portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.

William “Wild Bill” Guarnere and Edward “Babe” Heffron were among the first paratroopers of the U.S. Army—members of an elite unit of the 101st Airborne Division called Easy Company. The crack unit was called upon for every high-risk operation of the war, including D-Day, Operation Market Garden in Holland, the Battle of the Bulge, and the capture of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden. Both men fought side by side—until Guarnere lost his leg in the Battle of the Bulge and was sent home. Heffron went on to liberate concentration camps and take Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest hideout. United by their experience, they reconnected at the war’s end and have been best friends ever since. Their story is a tribute to the lasting bond forged between comrades in arms—and to all those who fought for freedom.

The Bush Tragedy

Jacob Weisberg

The Bush Tragedy Jacob Weisberg Amazon Price: $10.88
List Price: $16.00
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $9.08

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Presidents & Heads of State
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> People, A-Z -> ( B ) -> Bush, George
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 59 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This is the book that cracks the code of the Bush presidency. Unstintingly yet compassionately, and with no political ax to grind, Slate editor in chief Jacob Weisberg methodically and objectively examines the family and circle of advisers who played crucial parts in George W. Bush’s historic downfall.

In this revealing and defining portrait, Weisberg uncovers the “black box” from the crash of the Bush presidency. Using in-depth research, revealing analysis, and keen psychological acuity, Weisberg explores the whole Bush story. Distilling all that has been previously written about Bush into a defining portrait, he illuminates the fateful choices and key decisions that led George W., and thereby the country, into its current predicament. Weisberg gives the tragedy a historical and literary frame, comparing Bush not just to previous American leaders, but also to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, who rises from ne’er-do-well youth to become the warrior king Henry V.

Here is the bitter and fascinating truth of the early years of the Bush dynasty, with never-before-revealed information about the conflict between the two patriarchs on George W.’s father’s side of the family–the one an upright pillar of the community, the other a rowdy playboy–and how that schism would later shape and twist the younger George Bush; his father, a hero of war, business, and Republican politics whose accomplishments George W. would attempt to copy and whose absences he would resent; his mother, Barbara, who suffered from insecurity, depression, and deep dissatisfaction with her role as housewife; and his younger brother Jeb, seen by his parents as steadier, stronger, and the son most likely to succeed.

Weisberg also anatomizes the replacement family Bush surrounded himself with in Washington, a group he thought could help him correct the mistakes he felt had destroyed his father’s presidency: Karl Rove, who led Bush astray by pursuing his own historical ambitions and transforming the president into a deeply polarizing figure; Dick Cheney, whose obsessive quest to restore presidential power and protect the country after 9/11 caused Bush and America to lose the world’s respect; and, finally, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, who encouraged Bush’s foreign policy illusions and abetted his flight from reality.

Delving as no other biography has into Bush’s religious beliefs–which are presented as at once opportunistic and sincere–The Bush Tragedy is an essential work that is sure to become a standard reference for any future assessment. It is the most balanced and compelling account of a sitting president ever written.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom

Slavomir Rawicz

The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom Slavomir Rawicz Amazon Price: $11.53
List Price: $16.95
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: The Lyons Press
Amazon Marketplace: 71 new & used starting at $5.49

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Military -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 296 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves."--Slavomir Rawicz

In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk--a camp where enduring hunger, cold, untended wounds, untreated illnesses, and avoiding daily executions were everyday feats. Their march--over thousands of miles by foot--out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India is a remarkable statement about man's desire to be free.

While the original book sold hundreds of thousands of copies, this updated paperback version includes a new Afterword by the author, as well as the author's Foreword to the Polish book. Written in a hauntingly detailed, no holds barred way, the new edition of The Long Walk is destined to outrank its classic status and guaranteed to forever stay in the reader's mind.



Life with My Sister Madonna

Christopher Ciccone, Wendy Leigh

Life with My Sister Madonna Christopher Ciccone, Wendy Leigh Amazon Price: $17.16
List Price: $26.00
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Simon Spotlight Entertainment
Amazon Marketplace: 82 new & used starting at $6.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> Pop
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Composers & Musicians -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 194 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Madonna up close, by the brother who knows her better than anyone.

Christopher Ciccone's extraordinary memoir is based on his forty-seven years of growing up with, working with, and understanding the most famous woman of our time, who has intrigued, scandalized, and entertained millions for half a century.

Through most of the iconic star's kaleidoscopic career, Christopher played an important role in her life: as her backup dancer, her personal assistant, her dresser, her decorator, her art director, her tour director.

If you think you know everything there is to know about Madonna, you are wrong. Only Christopher can tell the full scale, riveting untold story behind Madonna's carefully constructed mythology, and the real woman behind the glittering façade.

From their shared Michigan childhood, which Madonna transcended, then whisked Christopher to Manhattan with her in the early eighties, where he slepton her roach-infested floor and danced with her in clubs all over town -- Christopher was with her every step of the way, experiencing her first hand in all her incarnations. The spoiled daddy's girl, the punk drummer, the raunchy Boy Toy, Material Girl, Mrs. Sean Penn, Warren Beatty's glamorous Hollywood paramour, loving mother, Mrs. Guy Ritchie, English grande dame -- Christopher witnessed and understood all of them, as his own life was inexorably entwined with that of his chameleon sister.

He tangled with a cast of characters from artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, to Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Moss, Demi Moore, and, of course, Guy Ritchie, whose advent in Madonna's life splintered the loving relationship Christopher once had with her.

The mirror image of his legendary sister, with his acid Ciccone tongue, Christopher pulls no punches as he tells his astonishing story.

Life with My Sister Madonna is the juicy, can't-put-it-down story you've always wanted to hear, as told by Madonna's younger brother.

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

Joseph J. Ellis

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson Joseph J. Ellis Amazon Price: $76.95
List Price: $76.95
Usually ships in 24 hours
By: Blackstone Audiobooks
Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $48.48

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> United States -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Historical -> United States -> General AAS
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Political

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 139 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight--and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1896); and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity--now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety--has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person.

For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the experience of writing about Jefferson was "as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, has discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing." In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams." For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out into the world at large--a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles.

From Ellis we learn that Jefferson sang incessantly under his breath; that he delivered only two public speeches in eight years as president, while spending ten hours a day at his writing desk; that sometimes his political sensibilities collided with his domestic agenda, as when he ordered an expensive piano from London during a boycott (and pledged to "keep it in storage"). We see him relishing such projects as the nailery at Monticello that allowed him to interact with his slaves more palatably, as pseudo-employer to pseudo-employees. We grow convinced that he preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than in the actual bedchamber. We watch him exhibiting both great depth and great shallowness, combining massive learning with extraordinary naïveté, piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest scale. We understand why we should neither beatify him nor consign him to the rubbish heap of history, though we are by no means required to stop loving him. He is Thomas Jefferson, after all--our very own sphinx.

Page 11 of 200 - Go to page: 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 22

Return to MagicBeanDip.com

This page was created in 1.0265 seconds.