Here are 100 books that Thomas Jefferson fans have personally recommended if you like
Thomas Jefferson.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Iām a British author for children and young adults and have lost count of the number of books Iāve published. Iāve won awards, and my books have been translated into many languages. Iām also an avid reader: have been for almost all of my life. I know a good series when it hooks me in!
I had my doubts about reading this because, wellā¦ Tudor history.
I love Mantelās work butā¦another trot through Henry VIIIās marriages and murders? I wasnāt sure it was for me. But within moments of opening the book, I was away with Mantel and Thomas Cromwell.
Even the title, Wolf Hall,Ā demonstrates her gift. It was the name of the Seymour familyās seat, and the book never takes us thereābut it was Jane Seymour who replaced Anne Boleyn and gave monstrous Henry his heir. The title hangs over the action, echoing, Man is wolf to man.
Mantelās Cromwell is complex, often kind as well as ruthless, but Mantel herself said that she presents only one possible view of him. Read it and make up your own mind!
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the the Orange Prize
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award
`Dizzyingly, dazzlingly good'
Daily Mail
'Our most brilliant English writer'
Guardian
England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor.
Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man withā¦
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last CastleĀ and The Girls of Atomic CityĀ comes a new way to look at American history: through the lens of giving thanks.
Author Denise Kiernan tells the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widowed mother of five who campaignedā¦
I read a lot of fiction, both out of love and as my job. One of my biggest frustrations is that itās so hard to find novels that are both thought-provoking and fun to read. Books that are page-turners often leave me feeling icky, like Iāve mowed down a big, greasy mess of french fries, and I have regrets. Books that are intellectually stimulating are like a bowl of kale that I nibble at and find easy to put down. When I find a novel that is both propulsive and thoughtful, that is my holy grail, and all of the books on this list hit that sweet spot for me.
I was blown away by the genius of telling a story ostensibly about the end of an era and an empire while the real story, a love story, runs just below the surface. I confess that I am not otherwise much of an Ishiguro fan, but this book is perfection.
I am old enough to have known members of a generation who valued loyalty and propriety above personal desires, and this novel made me both nostalgic for a time when self-sacrifice and self-control were so respected and sad about the happiness forfeited because of these social standards.
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available to preorder*
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's greatest writers. David Lodge, chairman of the judges in 1989, said, it's "a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance". This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Ishiguro's work has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks onā¦
I love history in all forms. I enjoy first-person memoirs, and I also love historical biographies if they are well-written. Native American history is one of my areas of fascination, and the founding of our country is another. World War two is another area that I have delved into in the last few years, and it's so complex. Ultimately, all of the books I recommended are connected to important historical events, but their real strength is the people whom they are about. Looking through my list, I see that all of the books are about underdogs or figures who ultimately did not prevail in terms of their specific situations.
We are probably familiar with the hit musicalĀ Hamilton, but the historical biography on which it was based is equally compelling. Chernow really makes Alexander Hamilton come to life as a fully rounded, complex person, not just a cardboard cutout of a founding father.
His myriad clashes with Thomas Jefferson, his service under General Washington in the Revolutionary War, and his involvement in one of the first public sex scandals are all fascinating parts of this amazing tome. I've re-read it a number of times, I find it so gripping and tragic.Ā
The #1 New York Times bestseller, and the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton!
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation.
"Grand-scale biography at its best-thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . A genuinely great book." -David McCullough
"A robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all." -Joseph Ellis
Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton.ā¦
History has enthralled me from a very young age, drawn as a child as I was to Vikings, cowboys and Indians, medieval knights, ancient conquerors, and mythological gods. After practicing law in Boston for 38 years, I retired to write history full time, not to string dates and facts together in a powder-dry mix but to try to breathe life into the vibrant men and women who enlivened their times and can shed a timeless light on the challenges of ours. Hard work though it is, I have never been so satisfied with life.
I have read many military diaries in my research on World War II, and none are more enthralling than this. Lieutenant General Alan Brooke (Colonel Shrapnel, a subordinate called him) was Britainās complicated Chief of the Imperial General Staff from November 1941 through the final victory.
From cover to cover, the diary he kept in the form of a chat with his wife ā āMy evening talk with you on paperā ā enlightened and often moved me with Brookeās unique insights about the perilous course of the war and his intimate, unfiltered observations and typically caustic opinions about his legendary British, French, and American colleagues, Winston Churchill memorably among them.
I know of no more candid, heartfelt exposure of the burdens, rewards, and personal challenges of high command in wartime.
For most of the Second World War, General Sir Alan Brooke (1883-1963), later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, was Britain's Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and Winston Churchill's principal military adviser, and antagonist, in the inner councils of war. He is commonly considered the greatest CIGS in the history of the British Army. His diaries--published here for the first time in complete and unexpurgated form--are one of the most important and the most controversial military diaries of the modern era. The last great chronicle of the Second World War, they provide a riveting blow-by-blow account of how the warā¦
History has enthralled me from a very young age, drawn as a child as I was to Vikings, cowboys and Indians, medieval knights, ancient conquerors, and mythological gods. After practicing law in Boston for 38 years, I retired to write history full time, not to string dates and facts together in a powder-dry mix but to try to breathe life into the vibrant men and women who enlivened their times and can shed a timeless light on the challenges of ours. Hard work though it is, I have never been so satisfied with life.
I have read many excellent books about World War Two, but none has kept me shaking my head in awe like this stunning account of the decisive US bombing campaign against Germany. Masters of the Air is an intensely personal account of the impossibly brave men and boys ā for boys they often were ā who bombed Nazi Germany into defeat.
Most of them by far were wounded, killed, or imprisoned, often in appalling conditions, after bailing out of plunging aircraft. It is hard to imagine a more moving account of tenacious courage and unimaginable stress or a more thorough, intriguing presentation of the air war over Germany.
I could not get enough of this vivid, inspiring book.
'Seconds after Brady's plane was hit, the Hundredth's entire formation was broken up and scattered by swarms of single-engine planes, and by rockets launched by twin-engine planes that flew parallel'
Meet the Flying Fortresses of the American Eighth Air Force, Britain's Lancaster comrades, who helped to bring down the Nazis
Historian and World War II expert Donald Miller brings us the story of the bomber boys who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep. Unlike ground soldiers they slept on clean beds, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of the travelling Air Force bands. But theyā¦
I could not reconcile teachings about right and wrong given to me by my parents and their religion with the evidence-based science I learned in medical school. As an adult, I studied morals, ethics, and religions and saw humanity on a self-destructive path, marked by world wars, genocides, destruction of civilizations, pollution of outer space, and poisons filling our land and oceans full of trash. There had to be a better way.
Janet Browne's biography of Charles Darwin caused one of the greatest leaps in understanding in my entire life. Browne depicts this amazing phase in young Charles Darwin's life when a young man's inquisitive brain lit up as he found his purpose.
It's worth noting that Darwin was a misfit in everything heād tried up to that point. In desperation, his father sent him on a voyage around the world as a companion to the captain, and Darwin's innate curiosity led to a life-changing investigation into why there were so many different species in so many different places. I relate to that wonderment and his question of how all this remarkable flora and fauna got here.Ā Ā
Few lives of great men offer so much interest--and so many mysteries--as the life of Charles Darwin, the greatest figure of nineteenth-century science, whose ideas are still inspiring discoveries and controversies more than a hundred years after his death. Yet only now, with the publication of Voyaging, the first of two volumes that will constitute the definitive biography, do we have a truly vivid and comprehensive picture of Darwin as man and as scientist. Drawing upon much new material, supported by an unmatched acquaintance with both the intellectual setting and the voluminous sources, Janet Browne has at last been ableā¦
I could not reconcile teachings about right and wrong given to me by my parents and their religion with the evidence-based science I learned in medical school. As an adult, I studied morals, ethics, and religions and saw humanity on a self-destructive path, marked by world wars, genocides, destruction of civilizations, pollution of outer space, and poisons filling our land and oceans full of trash. There had to be a better way.
The second volume of Janet Browne's great two-part biography is set in England, where Charles Darwin set to work in earnest. His epic book was still a manuscript when the true story began. Obsessed with finding answers, he focused on barnacles. He had them sent to him from all over the world and studied them in detail, itemizing their changes and differences until a new species emergedāalong with his remarkable epiphany.
Reading the book, I could feel the same sense of astonishment and discovery: that species occurred by natural selection, not some Divine hand. But Darwin chose not to fight the battles that this would cause with Christian believers, leaving that to his friend, Thomas Henry Huxley. It's a powerful reminder that every scientist and innovator needs an ally, even the most famous of them all.Ā
In 1858, Charles Darwin was forty-nine years old, a gentleman scientist living quietly at Down House in the Kent countryside. He was not yet a focus of debate; his "big book on species" still lay on his desk as a manuscript. For more than twenty years he had been accumulating material for it, puzzling over the questions that it raised, trying to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, and wanting to be certain that his startling theory of evolution was correct. It is at this point that the concluding volume of Janet Browne's magisterial biography opens. Beginning with the extraordinaryā¦
I could not reconcile teachings about right and wrong given to me by my parents and their religion with the evidence-based science I learned in medical school. As an adult, I studied morals, ethics, and religions and saw humanity on a self-destructive path, marked by world wars, genocides, destruction of civilizations, pollution of outer space, and poisons filling our land and oceans full of trash. There had to be a better way.
It's hard to explain what a revelation this book was to me. When I began this book, I was a believer in the Christian mythology as described to me by my parents and the church. I read through meticulous details of how different animals gradually changed and differentiated by natural selection into new species.
After reading the last word and closing the book, suddenly, the light dawned. I understood that no Divine hand had anything to do with the development of a myriad of different species on planet Earth, and all that creation mythology was anthropomorphic imagination.
I also understood that there was no Divine hand guiding us to a Divine purpose in lifeāwhich meant that it was up to us to make this world a better place, for not only the human species but all other life on this planet.Ā
Charles Darwinās classic that exploded into public controversy, revolutionized the course of science, and continues to transform our views of the world.
Few other books have created such a lasting storm of controversy as The Origin of Species. Darwinās theory that species derive from other species by a gradual evolutionary process and that the average level of each species is heightened by the āsurvival of the fittestā stirred up popular debate to fever pitch. Its acceptance revolutionized the course of science.
As Sir Julian Huxley, the noted biologist, points out in his illuminating introduction, the importance of Darwinās contribution toā¦
Iām a political theorist at Syracuse Universityās Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. I spent the first fifteen years or so of my career working on the Scottish and French Enlightenments (Adam Smith, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire), but in recent years Iāve been drawn more and more to the American founding. In addition to Fears of a Setting Sun, Iām also the author of The Constitutionās Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of Americaās Basic Charter, which explores the constitutional vision of the immensely colorful individual whoāunbeknownst to most Americansāwrote the US Constitution.
Gordon Wood is often described as the dean of historians of the American founding, and all of his books are eminently worth reading. I was lucky enough, as a postdoc at Brown University, to sit in on the last course that he taught on the American Revolution before his retirement. Of the many volumes that Wood has written, I picked this dual biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson not only because itās a delightful read, but also because itās the book that I was reading when the idea for my book struck me.
AĀ New York Times Book ReviewĀ Notable Book of 2017
From the great historian of the American Revolution, New York Times-bestselling and Pulitzer-winning Gordon Wood, comes a majestic dual biography of two of America's most enduringly fascinating figures, whose partnership helped birth a nation, and whose subsequent falling out did much to fix its course.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds, or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slaveowner, while Adams, theā¦
I've spent three decades teaching the history of the United States, especially the American Revolution, to students in the UK. Invariably some students are attracted by the ideals they identify with the United States while others stress the times that the US has failed to uphold those ideals. Thomas Jefferson helped to articulate those ideals and often came up short when it came to realizing them. This has fascinated me as well as my students. I'm the author or editor of eight books on Jefferson and the American Revolution including,Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy and The Blackwell Companion to Thomas Jefferson. I'm currently completing a book about the relationship between Jefferson and George Washington.
The study of Jefferson has been dominated by men and has largely focused on politics andĀ Jeffersonās relationships with men. Scharff presents an alternative perspective. She focuses on the women in Jeffersonās lifeāhis mother, sisters, wife, sisters-in-law, daughters, granddaughters, and the enslaved mother of his mixed-race children. The result is an original entry in the vast corpus of books on Jefferson. Itās beautifully written, imbued with sympathy for its subjects. Scharff offers a new perspective on Jefferson but also sheds light on the varied experiences of women of different races and classes in early America. The result is a study about much more than a āFounding Father.āĀ Ā
āA focused, fresh spin on Jeffersonian biography.ā āKirkus Reviews
In the tradition of Annette Gordon-Reedās The Hemingses of Monticello and David McCulloughās John Adams, historian Virginia Scharff offers a compelling, highly readable multi-generational biography revealing how the women Thomas Jefferson loved shaped the third presidentās ideas and his vision for the nation. Scharff creates a nuanced portrait of the preeminent founding father, examining Jefferson through the eyes of the women who were closest to him, from his mother to his wife and daughters to Sally Hemings and the slave family he began with her.
