Twilight at Monticello

October 22, 2007
Crawford (Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman) does a thorough if artless job of narrating Thomas Jefferson’s postpresidential years. Crawford’s narrative is a slave to chronology, which works against him. The first 50 pages are a highly condensed account of his life up through his presidency: information which, if it must be included, could have been more elegantly inserted into the main narrative. After this false start, Crawford’s story improves as he delivers an exhaustive account of Jefferson’s tangled dotage: the attempted murder of his much-loved grandson by another relative, his dealings with other descendants both white and black; his de facto bankruptcy; and his late relations with such fellow founders as Adams and Madison. Much of this has been recounted before, though interesting and surprising details abound. For example, a young Edgar Allan Poe was at Jefferson’s funeral. Despite all this diligence, however, Crawford’s narrative regularly stops dead in its tracks, especially when the author crawls inside Jefferson’s head, presuming to know his thoughts at a given moment. Crawford is quite sure, for example, that on the first day of February 1819, Jefferson dwelled upon “the planters’ financial plight, and his own... but this difficulty, Jefferson told himself, was surely temporary.”

February 18, 2008
It's unusual for people to have been so active in their golden years that they should merit a full-length biography focused solely on their achievements during retirement. Such is the case with Thomas Jefferson, who spent his post-presidential years managing (often badly) the affairs of his grand estate, corresponding with dignitaries and dealing with wayward relatives. Crawford is a careful, even micromanagerial, historian, prone to tangents about details that are often more interesting than the main narrative. On audio, such digressions can be confusing, and in the hands of narrator James Boles, they are sometimes tedious. Boles has an elegant but almost mournful style, with sluggish diction and delivery. His voice is a good match for Jefferson, who was erudite but deliberate and soft-spoken, but the tone changes little for the other players, including Jefferson's hotheaded in-laws. This makes for a monochromatic reading that does not do full justice to the complexities of the text. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 22, 2007).