The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson

Another study of Thomas Jefferson, but with a difference: this one focuses on Jefferson’s thought, especially on its development from his youth. The book’s freshness and immediacy lie in the author’s emphasis on the libraries Jefferson accumulated and the marginal notes he left in the books he read. Hayes, a scholar of reading habits and print culture, takes us through Jefferson’s hugely wide and eclectic reading with an ease and lightness often missing from a subject central to American history: how Jefferson came to possess the ideas that have resonated through America’s concept of itself. The result is lengthy—necessarily so, for no contemporaries (John Adams excepted) read and collected books as widely as Jefferson. His marginalia and correspondence and the books he purchased yield a remarkable record of one man’s responses to what his mind encountered, absorbed and rejected. While the book won’t appeal to those who want to learn more of Jefferson’s active life, it will enlighten and delight all those drawn to Jefferson and the early years of so many classic American ideas. 12 b&w illus. (Aug.)