Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks: Poems of Nation, Family & Romantic Love Collected by America's Third President
Thomas Jefferson, . . Steerforth, $35 (570pp) ISBN 978-1-58642-107-6
Scrapbooking may be trendy today, but it's not new: in the early 19th century, Thomas Jefferson clipped poems from newspapers and pasted them into books that he gave to his granddaughters. In a handsome and hefty tome, Gross, an expert on the British Romantics who has studied Jefferson's interest in their poetry, has reproduced Jefferson's favorite verses, many of them dealing with nationhood and a vision of republican leadership. Other poems deal with family, celebrating both a father's patriarchal authority over his children and his tender love for them. Jefferson's ambivalence toward women is captured: verse that seems misogynistic ("a wife should be...
Reviewed on: 03/06/2006
Genre: Nonfiction