History Lite

           Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson; the Art of Power.
           Sorry, but I just can’t take seriously a biography that begins like this: “He woke at first light. Lean and loose-limbed, Thomas Jefferson tossed back his sheets in his rooms at Conrad and McMunn’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill, swung his long legs out of bed, and plunged his feet into a basin of cold water – a lifelong habit he believed good for his health."
         Although there is over a page of notes at the back of the book verifying the content of these two sentences, covering every single fact except Jefferson’s tossing back of his sheets, it is an opening that does not inspire confidence that the book is going to be serious, well-written and pithy, which – off the top of my head – are the qualities I want in a history or biography.
         My doubts were confirmed later by the aside in this sentence: “Yet the two men [Jefferson and John Adams] – and, in time, Abigail, Adams’s wonderful wife – were to forge one of the greatest and most complicated alliances in American history.”  What does “wonderful wife” mean? If the author thinks of Abigail Adams as “wonderful” there should be a paragraph, either as a note or earlier in the text, explaining the adjective. My feeling on reading this – probably curmudgeonly and cynically mistaken – was that Meacham was referring not to Abigail Adams at all, but to Laura Linney, who played Abigail, as “wonderful,”  in the PBS series on John Adams. Come to think of it, there is no justification for the vague “one of the greatest” describing Jefferson and Adams’ alliance.
         I’ll keep reading, though. Meacham’s description of the political machinations among the founders is detailed and nuanced, as long as you forgive his careful and mildly patronizing All Things Considered style. (That’s NPR’s daily news program, which seems aimed at intelligent and curious eleven-year-olds.) But the book is not giving me much pleasure.
        Great American history: The Age of Federalism by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick.
        After writing the above I checked Meacham’s Wikipedia listing. He’s a big-shot at Random House, an erstwhile editor of Newsweek and Time and maintains a connection with public broadcasting, all of which explains an awful lot.