This whole series is produced by Harper Collins and first began appearing in the mid-2000s. There’s about a dozen or so short biographies from world figures like the three listed here, but also Balanchine, Caravaggio, Machiavelli, Beethoven, de Tocqueville, Freud, Muhammad, and Francis Crick. I previously read and reviewed the book on Machiavelli, and mostly thought it was good. What I began to notice more about the series is that the writers are primarily popular historians (or not historians at all), with a few examples of credentialed historians. It’s not a requirement obviously, but it does make you wonder at times.
George Washington: The Founding Father – 2/5
“As the central actor in the American Revolution, George Washington was one of the most important figures in world history.”
It’s weird to have a book subtitled “The Founding Father” outsourced to a hack British historian and journalist. This book bothered me almost from the onset, not because I think that George Washington is a figure who inspires tough questions, but because the almost flippancy with the questions that do arise is almost shocking here. The prose here is also so uncomplicated that it’s almost like this series is written for kids, but the other example demonstrate that it clearly is not. The two primary questions that arise from George Washington that require some integrity for a historian to deal with are his views and actions regarding slavery, and then his views and actions regarding Native Americans. The rest is compelling and interesting, and I am not looking for a book to tear down Washington. He’s a figure so molded by mythology, that what I want from any book about him, is a better understanding of who he is. I do credit this book for making more interested in a few other histories I’ve been wavering on (I am thinking of the books by Ron Chernow, Joseph Ellis, Nathaniel Philbrick, and Alexis Coe). This book tackles the above questions in this basic manner: even though he owned enslaved people, he treated them well, and manumitted them in his will. Even though he always called the Native American “savages”, he was nice to them.
Great! You want to know why I know that he didn’t treat enslaved people “well”? Because he owned them. Slavery is is inherently violent system, and while it does matter if someone acts against the time, he enriched himself off their labor, and only freed them when he died. In addition, this book does not spend enough time with the question so I don’t know whether or not he supported them after liberation, which seems like an important thing to know. The rest is almost boilerplate and who I assume might be a complicated figure, deserves a more rigorous wrestling with the history.
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America – 4/5
Christopher Hitchens thankfully does seem to understand some key ideas. One, Thomas Jefferson is and always has been an ambiguous figure. He’s ambiguous in his writing, both espousing some of the most liberational ideas in the history of the world, and some of more dreadful racism you will ever read, if you allow yourself the chance. He was a great believer in the rights of man, and a slave-owner who sold families to pay off debts, and of course had children with Sally Hemmings (the relationship being inherently dubious, if complicated). Two, he also knows that he is not a historian and lets his more qualified forebears do the work for him, borrowing and assessing as he goes. He uses the work of Annette Gordon-Reed in this book from 2005, before her long history of the Hemmingses, primarily citing her earlier work that deals with it more directly.
Hitchens still tells the life and history of Jefferson, but this is a good rendering that biography, especially refusing to ignore or dismiss or explain away the connections to Sally Hemmings story. I don’t know that this makes it an excellent book or not (again, the longer, fuller histories by Gordon-Reed, Joseph Ellis, and others would be more worth the time), but it’s a solid rendition and start. And of course Hitchens, even at his worst self, is an excellent prose writer.
Ulysses S Grant: The Unlikely Hero 3/5
Again, it seems weird that three British writers are tackling three of the most impactful American biographies. But here we are. For reasons that are completely confounding and uncomfortable, this book begins with a story about Beyonce giving a concert outside of Grant’s Tomb, that drew complaints for its lasciviousness. Korda uses this moment to react to one flippant remark “Who knows, he might have liked it” to suggest that Grant would not have, not because he was a prude, but that he was a devoted husband who was apparently made very uncomfortable by anything remotely outside his marriage. It’s a weird way to start this out, and unfair to Beyonce.
Anyway, it’s also weird reading this given I have read Grant’s memoirs, and that there are longer, better, and more thorough biographies of his out there. It IS nice though to have a biography about Grant not written by someone who holds “Lost Cause” values (although I don’t actually know about Korda, but he’s not a Southern-born historian at like Emory or anything like that). Again, like all of these, it piques rather than satisfies my curiosity.
