Who was Thomas Jefferson?  Do we really need another book about him?  Andrew Burstein has written other books on Jefferson, and his new book, Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait answers both questions with depth and grace.  Jefferson was an extraordinarily interesting person, and Burstein navigates his ambition, friendships, rivalries, political controversies, and intellectual inquiries.  Biography, Burstein shows, is not just storytelling but interpretation, recovering what Jefferson and his generation thought they were doing as they built a new nation, reconsidering the Revolution as lived experience rather than legend/  Burstein shows  Jefferson and his contemporaries as vividly human architects of an unfinished experiment.

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