cover image The Founders at Home: 
The Building of America, 1735–1817

The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735–1817

Myron Magnet. Norton, $35 (448p) ISBN 978-0-393-24021-4

The founders of the American republic distinguished themselves by making political change without altering their nation’s economic structure and by setting strict limits on government. Journalist Magnet (Dickens and the Social Order) ploddingly retells tales of the earliest years of the republic, through brief biographies of founding figures George Washington, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, New Jersey Governor William Livingston, and the Lees of Virginia. Magnet shows how each founder’s ideas about the structure of the new republic grew out of, and informed, his home life and the houses he constructed. “Because they were trying to create a new nation where Americans would be truly at home, the houses they themselves inhabited... offer a vivid glimpse... into the ideal of life they imagined for themselves and for their countrymen.” To walk through Jefferson’s Monticello “is to feel oneself in a microcosm of Jefferson’s conception of the universe, a complex order whose parts mesh precisely, as one sees once one grasps the plan.” Regrettably, Magnet merely tacks on material about the most fascinating aspects of the design and construction of these founders’ houses, leaving us to wade frustratingly through dull accounts of familiar stories. (Nov.)