*Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History*

That is the forthcoming book by Andrew Burstein, who is also author of the excellent Madison and Jefferson (with Nancy Isenberg).  I am sent many books on the founding and Founding Fathers, and while I find their average quality to be high, usually they do not grab my attention.  I have already read plenty in that area.  I also have consumed many books on Jefferson in particular,s Dumas Malone boring or magisterial?  But this one I read straight through, as it is simply…compelling.  Excerpt:

Three thousand copies of Esquisse were issued in 1795, nine years before the publication of Condorcet’s Collected Writings in twenty-one volumes [TC: when is the AI-assisted translation coming?].  As a systematic compendium of the philosophe’s outlook on all matters of human intervention and the “perfectability” of the species, the book advances through the stages of social development from early times in order to address the need for liberation of the progressive spirit through all available means of encouragement.  He applaus every perceptible advance toward closing the economic gap between the wealthy and everyone else, as well as equality under the law, rights of conscience, decolonization, and universal suffrage.  It is difficult to find another Enlightenment figure who went as far as Condorcet in envisioning a just society.

And:

President Thomas Jefferson, self-styled champion of republican methods, was putting his finger on the scale here.  It is hard to pretend otherwise.  With an unwarranted exercise of power aimed at weakening the Supreme Court, he was acting from a private need to humiliate a man who treated a nonelective position as a partisan platform.  While the emotion is quite understandable, Jefferson’s justice was purely retributive.

Recommended, you can pre-order here.