By JOHN WILLIAMS
In the spirit of this week’s holiday, I recently asked various Times staffers to recommend books about American political figures. Their answers are below. On Twitter, I’ll be asking readers for their own suggestions, a selection of which will be shared on this blog in the coming days.
Jill Abramson, Executive Editor
My favorite book about an American political figure is “The Hemingses of Monticello,” a mammoth account of the relationship between Sally Hemings, a slave, and Thomas Jefferson. While tracing the Hemings family through the generations, Annette Gordon-Reed’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson is most memorable. It emerges as Ms. Gordon-Reed traces the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings from the days when he was a young diplomat in Paris back to Monticello, where the aging former president struggled with debts and fulfilled a compact to free some of Hemings’s children. Neither Jefferson nor Hemings left behind any record of their relationship, but Ms. Gordon-Reed weaves a rich tapestry, partly based on conjecture, which is one reason the book, when published, was controversial. It is also compulsively readable, and makes a compelling case that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s seven children, an issue that still ignites furor.
Michiko Kakutani, Chief Book Critic
Fred Kaplan’s 2008 study, “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer,” takes one aspect of the 16th president — his love of books and his own eloquent command of language — and uses it to shed new light on his philosophy and politics. Although Mr. Kaplan draws heavily on the work of earlier scholars (like Jacques Barzun and Edmund Wilson), he does a nimble job of showing how Shakespeare, the Bible and other works — including Aesop’s fables and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” — helped shape Lincoln’s almost existential view of the human condition, and how they informed his own evolution into one of the “canonical writers of American literature.” By turns oratorical and direct, inspirational and plain-spoken, Lincoln’s voice would enable him to articulate his vision of the new America that might emerge from the Civil War — an America dedicated to completing the unfinished work of its founders and dedicated, in his words, “to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Sam Tanenhaus, Book Review Editor
Edmund Wilson, “Patriotic Gore.” Published in 1962 — 101 years after the Civil War began — Wilson captures the drama of this most cataclysmic event in vivid portraits of two dozen Americans—men and women, Northerners and Southerners, generals and politicians, novelists and poets. The subjects include, among many others, Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ulysses Grant, the plantation diarist Mary Chesnut, and the New Orleans novelist George Washington Cable.
Barry Gewen, Book Review Preview Editor
I’m going to make two suggestions, one that others might mention and another than I’m sure nobody will suggest. The first is Garry Wills’s “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” which gives us an incredible and somewhat unconventional mind wrapping itself about the words and thoughts of American history’s greatest political figure (sorry, George). The other is C. Vann Woodward’s “Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel.” It’s been years, decades actually, since I read it, but I remember its being not only a model biography by one of the major American historians but also an incisive and pioneering analysis of American populism, examining both its progressive and regressive aspects. Watson was one of the first in a long line of politicians who combined sympathy for the underdog with darker, conspiratorial and racist impulses, and we can trace his way of thinking from his era at the end of the 19th century right down to the conflicted ideas of the Tea Party in our own.
Richard Berke, Assistant Managing Editor
I’d vote for Richard Ben Cramer’s depiction of Bob Dole in “What It Takes: The Way to The White House.” Mr. Cramer spent years digging into the personalities of the people who wanted to be president in 1988. And rather than the usual campaign book, he wrote mini-biographies of what led these ordinary-seeming Americans to even think they belonged in the White House. The parts about Mr. Dole are particularly entertaining and revealing, and help you understand — deeply — what drives him and what he’s like to be around. And that he’s actually a more likable figure than you would have known from the press coverage.
Jodi Kantor, Domestic Correspondent
What would Marjorie Williams have made of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? We’ll never know, because Williams, the greatest Washington profilist of her era, died far too soon, in 2005 at the age of 47. But we do have two collections, “Woman at the Washington Zoo” and “Reputation,” filled with articles that are each novellas about power, ambition and image. The article that Ms. Williams wrote about Barbara Bush is perhaps the best portrait ever written about a first lady. (Or maybe it ties Gloria Steinem’s encounter with Patricia Nixon.) “Even Barbara Bush’s stepmother is afraid of her,” the story begins. Ms. Williams goes on to peel Mrs. Bush like an onion, past the America’s-favorite-grandmother layer, past the harshness that made people fear her, to the little-known trials that made Mrs. Bush so tough. Ms. Williams was tough, too: her writing cut deep, and articles like “Scenes From a Marriage,” about the collapse of the relationship between Bill Clinton and Al Gore, can be painful to read. But she could also be tender, and the newspaper columns she includes here — like “The Random Death of Our Sense of Ease,” about the Washington sniper and her own cancer diagnosis, show how deeply she lived, felt and observed everything around her.
Jill Abramson, Executive Editor
My favorite book about an American political figure is “The Hemingses of Monticello,” a mammoth account of the relationship between Sally Hemings, a slave, and Thomas Jefferson. While tracing the Hemings family through the generations, Annette Gordon-Reed’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson is most memorable. It emerges as Ms. Gordon-Reed traces the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings from the days when he was a young diplomat in Paris back to Monticello, where the aging former president struggled with debts and fulfilled a compact to free some of Hemings’s children. Neither Jefferson nor Hemings left behind any record of their relationship, but Ms. Gordon-Reed weaves a rich tapestry, partly based on conjecture, which is one reason the book, when published, was controversial. It is also compulsively readable, and makes a compelling case that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s seven children, an issue that still ignites furor.
Michiko Kakutani, Chief Book Critic
Fred Kaplan’s 2008 study, “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer,” takes one aspect of the 16th president — his love of books and his own eloquent command of language — and uses it to shed new light on his philosophy and politics. Although Mr. Kaplan draws heavily on the work of earlier scholars (like Jacques Barzun and Edmund Wilson), he does a nimble job of showing how Shakespeare, the Bible and other works — including Aesop’s fables and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” — helped shape Lincoln’s almost existential view of the human condition, and how they informed his own evolution into one of the “canonical writers of American literature.” By turns oratorical and direct, inspirational and plain-spoken, Lincoln’s voice would enable him to articulate his vision of the new America that might emerge from the Civil War — an America dedicated to completing the unfinished work of its founders and dedicated, in his words, “to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Sam Tanenhaus, Book Review Editor
Edmund Wilson, “Patriotic Gore.” Published in 1962 — 101 years after the Civil War began — Wilson captures the drama of this most cataclysmic event in vivid portraits of two dozen Americans—men and women, Northerners and Southerners, generals and politicians, novelists and poets. The subjects include, among many others, Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ulysses Grant, the plantation diarist Mary Chesnut, and the New Orleans novelist George Washington Cable.
Barry Gewen, Book Review Preview Editor
I’m going to make two suggestions, one that others might mention and another than I’m sure nobody will suggest. The first is Garry Wills’s “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” which gives us an incredible and somewhat unconventional mind wrapping itself about the words and thoughts of American history’s greatest political figure (sorry, George). The other is C. Vann Woodward’s “Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel.” It’s been years, decades actually, since I read it, but I remember its being not only a model biography by one of the major American historians but also an incisive and pioneering analysis of American populism, examining both its progressive and regressive aspects. Watson was one of the first in a long line of politicians who combined sympathy for the underdog with darker, conspiratorial and racist impulses, and we can trace his way of thinking from his era at the end of the 19th century right down to the conflicted ideas of the Tea Party in our own.
Richard Berke, Assistant Managing Editor
I’d vote for Richard Ben Cramer’s depiction of Bob Dole in “What It Takes: The Way to The White House.” Mr. Cramer spent years digging into the personalities of the people who wanted to be president in 1988. And rather than the usual campaign book, he wrote mini-biographies of what led these ordinary-seeming Americans to even think they belonged in the White House. The parts about Mr. Dole are particularly entertaining and revealing, and help you understand — deeply — what drives him and what he’s like to be around. And that he’s actually a more likable figure than you would have known from the press coverage.
Jodi Kantor, Domestic Correspondent
What would Marjorie Williams have made of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? We’ll never know, because Williams, the greatest Washington profilist of her era, died far too soon, in 2005 at the age of 47. But we do have two collections, “Woman at the Washington Zoo” and “Reputation,” filled with articles that are each novellas about power, ambition and image. The article that Ms. Williams wrote about Barbara Bush is perhaps the best portrait ever written about a first lady. (Or maybe it ties Gloria Steinem’s encounter with Patricia Nixon.) “Even Barbara Bush’s stepmother is afraid of her,” the story begins. Ms. Williams goes on to peel Mrs. Bush like an onion, past the America’s-favorite-grandmother layer, past the harshness that made people fear her, to the little-known trials that made Mrs. Bush so tough. Ms. Williams was tough, too: her writing cut deep, and articles like “Scenes From a Marriage,” about the collapse of the relationship between Bill Clinton and Al Gore, can be painful to read. But she could also be tender, and the newspaper columns she includes here — like “The Random Death of Our Sense of Ease,” about the Washington sniper and her own cancer diagnosis, show how deeply she lived, felt and observed everything around her.
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