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Jefferson's Demons
A fascinating new audiobook about Thomas Jefferson's lifelong struggle to overcome despair. How many Americans know that a few weeks before Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence, he lay in a dark room paralyzed by a mysterious malaise, unable to act? Jefferson has long been regarded as a confident optimist whose faith in the future gave Americans the right, in the Declaration of Independence, to pursue happiness. Jefferson's Demons shows how complicated Jefferson's own efforts to pursue happiness were. Beran reveals the hidden life of a man who suffered through periods of headache and morbid horror, shadowed intervals in which he was filled with "gloomy forebodings" about what lay ahead. In a beautiful and revelatory narrative, Beran describes how Jefferson overcame his fears and transformed anxiety into action, the powerful labors that created Monticello and the Declaration of Independence, a new republic and a lasting political party. Beran uncovers the heretofore unexamined maps Jefferson used to find his way out of dejection and fight the battles of his public career--as well as his battles with himself. This pathbreaking audiobook gives us a Jefferson for our time, a sage who can speak to our own chaotic and uncertain age. The hero of Jefferson's Demons is a human Jefferson, a man who turned to the past to learn how to make productive use of his demons. It will force many to rethink the meaning of his exemplary journey.
Audio CD
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 10, 2021
The blurb where the most entertaining and well written parts of the book. Didn't work for me at all. It failed to hold my interest and I just didn't care by the half point in what it had to say. Even tough in theory this would be something I would like. Some people can make you very interested and intruiged by the smaller most obscure things, while other bore the curiosity out of you from something that generally interests you normally.
January 17, 2012
Writing:
Ugh. The author tries really hard to make this academic and literary by including "big" words and fancy terms when others would work just as well. The word "ennui" is used about 8 bazillion times throughout the book. It's also a pet peeve of mine for an author to write as if he's using a thesaurus.
In just one example, Beran describes "sanguinary violence" when he very well could have said "bloody violence" or just "violence". When you're describing the French Revolution, we can pretty much assume that it was bloody. Forcing readers to a dictionary doesn't make an author seem smarter, it just aggravates the reader. And look, I'm not advocating that readers never have vocabulary challenges. But my problem is with authors who use those words repeatedly and unnecessarily. If your big word is the best word for the passage, then use it and I'll gladly look its meaning up in a dictionary. But don't write as though you're using a thesaurus to find all of your adjectives.
No problems with the research itself, everything is documented appropriately, it's just written in a stuffy manner.
Entertainment Value:
None. This book actually probably would have been best used as a back up for having forgotten my Ambien, because I couldn't make it through more than 5 or 10 pages without passing out. Through the first 100 pages, Jefferson actually doesn't do very much at all. He goes to Europe, a part I was particularly anxious to hear about from his point of view, but instead of seeing his political interactions in France, particularly with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, we get 100 pages of Jefferson taking a road trip to look at architecture and taste wines. Actually, we get more like 95 pages about the architecture and wines of the day and 5 pages of Jefferson doing anything at all. That's an exaggeration, but not by far. I will grant the author that it is interesting to note how the architectural styles of the period, particularly the ruins being uncovered, influenced Jefferson's decisions in building his home, but that can be said in a sentence.
What really really bothered me is that we get no sense of Jefferson's "demons" at all. We see some vague references to a family history of mental illness, we see Jefferson being melancholy at times, but the descriptions of his depression and how they impacted him politically are really barely present at all. Overall, I learned more about Thomas Jefferson as a person and as a president from reading a biography of John Adams and I learned it in a much more entertaining way. I was also really disappointed that I still know nothing about Jefferson's motivations for some of the more slimy things he did.
In short, I do not recommend giving this one a try, unless maybe you're dealing with some terrible insomnia. I know there has got to be a better Jefferson biography out there, but for now I'm moving on to James Madison.
Ugh. The author tries really hard to make this academic and literary by including "big" words and fancy terms when others would work just as well. The word "ennui" is used about 8 bazillion times throughout the book. It's also a pet peeve of mine for an author to write as if he's using a thesaurus.
In just one example, Beran describes "sanguinary violence" when he very well could have said "bloody violence" or just "violence". When you're describing the French Revolution, we can pretty much assume that it was bloody. Forcing readers to a dictionary doesn't make an author seem smarter, it just aggravates the reader. And look, I'm not advocating that readers never have vocabulary challenges. But my problem is with authors who use those words repeatedly and unnecessarily. If your big word is the best word for the passage, then use it and I'll gladly look its meaning up in a dictionary. But don't write as though you're using a thesaurus to find all of your adjectives.
No problems with the research itself, everything is documented appropriately, it's just written in a stuffy manner.
Entertainment Value:
None. This book actually probably would have been best used as a back up for having forgotten my Ambien, because I couldn't make it through more than 5 or 10 pages without passing out. Through the first 100 pages, Jefferson actually doesn't do very much at all. He goes to Europe, a part I was particularly anxious to hear about from his point of view, but instead of seeing his political interactions in France, particularly with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, we get 100 pages of Jefferson taking a road trip to look at architecture and taste wines. Actually, we get more like 95 pages about the architecture and wines of the day and 5 pages of Jefferson doing anything at all. That's an exaggeration, but not by far. I will grant the author that it is interesting to note how the architectural styles of the period, particularly the ruins being uncovered, influenced Jefferson's decisions in building his home, but that can be said in a sentence.
What really really bothered me is that we get no sense of Jefferson's "demons" at all. We see some vague references to a family history of mental illness, we see Jefferson being melancholy at times, but the descriptions of his depression and how they impacted him politically are really barely present at all. Overall, I learned more about Thomas Jefferson as a person and as a president from reading a biography of John Adams and I learned it in a much more entertaining way. I was also really disappointed that I still know nothing about Jefferson's motivations for some of the more slimy things he did.
In short, I do not recommend giving this one a try, unless maybe you're dealing with some terrible insomnia. I know there has got to be a better Jefferson biography out there, but for now I'm moving on to James Madison.
November 15, 2016
I didn't read this whole book, so my review might not be worth much. But did Michael Knox Beran really refer to "the great Tidewater plantations" as "enchanted zones of tranquility and order?"
I had no idea slavery was still remembered so fondly by conservative intellectuals! But the more I read Beran's work, the more it becomes clear he's just an all-around curmudgeon . . . or a creep. You should hear what he has to say about Eleanor Roosevelt!
I had no idea slavery was still remembered so fondly by conservative intellectuals! But the more I read Beran's work, the more it becomes clear he's just an all-around curmudgeon . . . or a creep. You should hear what he has to say about Eleanor Roosevelt!
October 23, 2022
Overwritten but easily the most entertaining biography of Jefferson that I have read. Some of the sentences were memorable because of the juxtaposition of eighteenth and twentieth century vocabulary. Here is a sampling
p.17 Some colonists rebelled more fiercely than others. Jefferson later said that his own sympathies lay with Virginia’s radicals, with Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, men who talked fire, and who were impatient with the lethargic leadership of the old guard. Some have questioned the closeness of Jefferson’s association with the radicals; he was perhaps more intimately connected to steadier hands like Peyton Randolph, who was his kinsman, and who served as Virginia’s attorney general. But although Jefferson was attached, by ties of blood and friendship, to the silver-haired patricians of the province, he was nevertheless determined to show what he called “forwardness and zeal” in the struggle to resist the usurpations of the Parliament at Westminster.
p.20 For Jefferson the problem of virtuous action was not only a political one; it was also a personal one. He happened to like luxury; and luxury according to the prevailing theories, was the nemesis of virtue… Jefferson was drawn, as by instinct, to beauty and to opulence, to pillared porticoes, to curiously wrought silver, to the rarer and more singular wines; his favorite recreation lay in drawing the plans of magnificent buildings.
p.21 It was the paradox of their revolution that, in order to win it, the Americans were forced to develop qualities of character that were anathema to their ends. To prevail, the provincial rebels were required to study, and master, those forms of civic heroism that their revolutionary efforts were intended to render obsolete.
p.26 Among the rights enunciated in the Declaration are te right to life and (implicitly) to property, as well as the right to liberty. (Jefferson himself was especially zealous for liberty of trade, liberty of conscience, and liberty of the press.) Only once in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration does a vestige of the older world appear in all its aboriginal strength—when he makes the signers pledge to one another their “sacred honor.” Honor is a feudal idea, dark with meanings and obligations that have almost ceased to be comprehensible to us.
p.62 As a man descended from a family with a history of mental instability. Jefferson had taken pains to develop rules and maxims to protect his own sanity. He had devised a variety of strategies to lift himself out of ennui. He liked to draw up architectural plans, read obscure books, speculate in curious lines of thought; he took more pleasure than most men in shopping.
p.71 Jefferson was a searcher. The fanatical book buyer often is. He approaches each volume as though it contained a revelation.
p.96 Jefferson—the man who believed that the tree of liberty could be kept fertile only through the shedding of blood—decorated his living room wit the utensils of primitive slaughter. Like the blood-and-vegetation poetry of Virgil’s Georgics, the primitive relics spoke to him, knives and all. When the axes fell, and the blood flowed, the drippings nourished all those places in the master’s soul that reason and Enlightenment could not refresh.
p.100 The brilliant or prophetic “forebodings” of the most inspired philosophers and poets were, Jefferson believed, not the supernatural inspirations of men working syn daimoni, in fruitful partnership with their demons; their high thoughts were rather the product of their own minds, consciences, and imaginations. Those credulous souls who insisted on attributing to divine or supernatural causes what was in reality a purely human genius were guilty of what Jefferson called Daemonism.
p.102 Jefferson, with his involutions of character, his dark privacies, his idiosyncrasies of style, his geometric joys—the whole masking subterfuge of his guises and personas – owed much to these Renaissance refinements of a classical idea.
p.103 One of the most powerful of his voices, as we shall see, would emerge only in the 1790s—the decade in which he turned fifty—in the course of his conflict with Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party. The emergence of this voice and the assumption by Jefferson of the role of the persecuted prophet of democracy would change the course of American history.
p.120 Jefferson had established himself as a prophet in Jerusalem, and in the midst of his despair he spoke comfortably: he predicted that the Federalist money changers would be turned out of the Temple. The schismatical speeches, the vain oblations, of the party of Hamilton might for a time deceive, but eventually the imposters would be found out. Their “Pharisaical homage” to banks and lords and kings would be repudiate d. In a letter to Lafayette, Jefferson said that the heretical “preachers” of the alien dogmas remained “without followers.” “Our people,” he said, remained “firm & constant in their republican purity.”
p.135 Jefferson began at once to rally his party. He condemned the evildoers who had laid waste to Jerusalem. The Republic had been as a garden enclosed, an orchard of pleasant fruits, but into the garden the serpents had stolen… The orthodox body of the citizenry, though true in their hearts to the spirit of 1776 were the “dupes” of these “artful manoeuvers” and had been persuaded by their “seducers” to be “willing instruments in forging chains for themselves”
p.152 Eagles fly alone, as must all true prophets. Like Milton, Jefferson disdained the crowd of timorous spirits that flocked together in the dusk, afraid of progress. He resolved to follow not those courtly peacocks but Milton’s mantic bird. He had like her, built his nest upon a solitary height, one from which he could contemplate “transcendent objects.” It was from this perch, presumably, that he first beheld the vision of the republican rapture enounced in the inaugural address—his picture of a “rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry.”
p.17 Some colonists rebelled more fiercely than others. Jefferson later said that his own sympathies lay with Virginia’s radicals, with Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, men who talked fire, and who were impatient with the lethargic leadership of the old guard. Some have questioned the closeness of Jefferson’s association with the radicals; he was perhaps more intimately connected to steadier hands like Peyton Randolph, who was his kinsman, and who served as Virginia’s attorney general. But although Jefferson was attached, by ties of blood and friendship, to the silver-haired patricians of the province, he was nevertheless determined to show what he called “forwardness and zeal” in the struggle to resist the usurpations of the Parliament at Westminster.
p.20 For Jefferson the problem of virtuous action was not only a political one; it was also a personal one. He happened to like luxury; and luxury according to the prevailing theories, was the nemesis of virtue… Jefferson was drawn, as by instinct, to beauty and to opulence, to pillared porticoes, to curiously wrought silver, to the rarer and more singular wines; his favorite recreation lay in drawing the plans of magnificent buildings.
p.21 It was the paradox of their revolution that, in order to win it, the Americans were forced to develop qualities of character that were anathema to their ends. To prevail, the provincial rebels were required to study, and master, those forms of civic heroism that their revolutionary efforts were intended to render obsolete.
p.26 Among the rights enunciated in the Declaration are te right to life and (implicitly) to property, as well as the right to liberty. (Jefferson himself was especially zealous for liberty of trade, liberty of conscience, and liberty of the press.) Only once in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration does a vestige of the older world appear in all its aboriginal strength—when he makes the signers pledge to one another their “sacred honor.” Honor is a feudal idea, dark with meanings and obligations that have almost ceased to be comprehensible to us.
p.62 As a man descended from a family with a history of mental instability. Jefferson had taken pains to develop rules and maxims to protect his own sanity. He had devised a variety of strategies to lift himself out of ennui. He liked to draw up architectural plans, read obscure books, speculate in curious lines of thought; he took more pleasure than most men in shopping.
p.71 Jefferson was a searcher. The fanatical book buyer often is. He approaches each volume as though it contained a revelation.
p.96 Jefferson—the man who believed that the tree of liberty could be kept fertile only through the shedding of blood—decorated his living room wit the utensils of primitive slaughter. Like the blood-and-vegetation poetry of Virgil’s Georgics, the primitive relics spoke to him, knives and all. When the axes fell, and the blood flowed, the drippings nourished all those places in the master’s soul that reason and Enlightenment could not refresh.
p.100 The brilliant or prophetic “forebodings” of the most inspired philosophers and poets were, Jefferson believed, not the supernatural inspirations of men working syn daimoni, in fruitful partnership with their demons; their high thoughts were rather the product of their own minds, consciences, and imaginations. Those credulous souls who insisted on attributing to divine or supernatural causes what was in reality a purely human genius were guilty of what Jefferson called Daemonism.
p.102 Jefferson, with his involutions of character, his dark privacies, his idiosyncrasies of style, his geometric joys—the whole masking subterfuge of his guises and personas – owed much to these Renaissance refinements of a classical idea.
p.103 One of the most powerful of his voices, as we shall see, would emerge only in the 1790s—the decade in which he turned fifty—in the course of his conflict with Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party. The emergence of this voice and the assumption by Jefferson of the role of the persecuted prophet of democracy would change the course of American history.
p.120 Jefferson had established himself as a prophet in Jerusalem, and in the midst of his despair he spoke comfortably: he predicted that the Federalist money changers would be turned out of the Temple. The schismatical speeches, the vain oblations, of the party of Hamilton might for a time deceive, but eventually the imposters would be found out. Their “Pharisaical homage” to banks and lords and kings would be repudiate d. In a letter to Lafayette, Jefferson said that the heretical “preachers” of the alien dogmas remained “without followers.” “Our people,” he said, remained “firm & constant in their republican purity.”
p.135 Jefferson began at once to rally his party. He condemned the evildoers who had laid waste to Jerusalem. The Republic had been as a garden enclosed, an orchard of pleasant fruits, but into the garden the serpents had stolen… The orthodox body of the citizenry, though true in their hearts to the spirit of 1776 were the “dupes” of these “artful manoeuvers” and had been persuaded by their “seducers” to be “willing instruments in forging chains for themselves”
p.152 Eagles fly alone, as must all true prophets. Like Milton, Jefferson disdained the crowd of timorous spirits that flocked together in the dusk, afraid of progress. He resolved to follow not those courtly peacocks but Milton’s mantic bird. He had like her, built his nest upon a solitary height, one from which he could contemplate “transcendent objects.” It was from this perch, presumably, that he first beheld the vision of the republican rapture enounced in the inaugural address—his picture of a “rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry.”
November 6, 2022
This is the best book about a founding father that I've ever read. I actually read it years ago, but am adding it now because it needs to be read by others who are interested in all things Jefferson.
Beran delves into the mind of Jefferson using his correspondence and what was going on in his life at that time as well as what was happening in this young country at the particular moment when the matter in question occurs.
Beran nailed this one in my opinion
Beran delves into the mind of Jefferson using his correspondence and what was going on in his life at that time as well as what was happening in this young country at the particular moment when the matter in question occurs.
Beran nailed this one in my opinion
March 5, 2018
I recommend this book. However, it is not the book for you if you're looking for an account of political history. There are plenty of books that cover political history and you should probably read some of those first. Then this book is a great complement, giving a more intimate insight to Jefferson as a man and some of his day to day activities.
I love the way Michael Knox Beran uses an expanded vocabulary, and I don't think "ennui" is overused. It shows up a handful of times in a span of 20 pages where the author discusses a period of Jefferson's life where "ennui" shows up in much of Jefferson's own writing. I do recommend you keep a dictionary nearby, and don't be afraid to learn some new words. My personal favorites: offal (ch 3.5), pueurile (ch 4.5)...and best of all :cheeseparing!! (ch 3.5)
There is an interesting section about demons, but not demons as we think of them. Rather, "demons" refers to the Greek or Roman interpretation of a demon as a spirit that is assigned to a man at birth and dictates the character and fortunes of the man. Jefferson was heavily influenced by Roman and Greek literature, and there was some conflict between his love for reason and the remnants of mysticism that lingered in his time. Regardless, I think "Jefferson's Demons" is a poor title and doesn't capture the spirit (sorry for the pun) of the book. My bet is that the publisher pushed for this title to get people to buy the book, thinking that it would be a character assassination. Judging by some of the reviews on this site, it appears to have worked.
I love the way Michael Knox Beran uses an expanded vocabulary, and I don't think "ennui" is overused. It shows up a handful of times in a span of 20 pages where the author discusses a period of Jefferson's life where "ennui" shows up in much of Jefferson's own writing. I do recommend you keep a dictionary nearby, and don't be afraid to learn some new words. My personal favorites: offal (ch 3.5), pueurile (ch 4.5)...and best of all :cheeseparing!! (ch 3.5)
There is an interesting section about demons, but not demons as we think of them. Rather, "demons" refers to the Greek or Roman interpretation of a demon as a spirit that is assigned to a man at birth and dictates the character and fortunes of the man. Jefferson was heavily influenced by Roman and Greek literature, and there was some conflict between his love for reason and the remnants of mysticism that lingered in his time. Regardless, I think "Jefferson's Demons" is a poor title and doesn't capture the spirit (sorry for the pun) of the book. My bet is that the publisher pushed for this title to get people to buy the book, thinking that it would be a character assassination. Judging by some of the reviews on this site, it appears to have worked.
September 9, 2021
"Jefferson's Demons" is not a book I would recommend for anyone first beginning to learn about Thomas Jefferson. It is not a summary sketch of his life from cradle to grave, nor is it focused specifically on his political ideologies. However, if you have an interest in Jefferson's private emotional battles with the more cumbersome aspects of life (pessimism, heartache, anxiety, personal vices, etc.) than this book is for you.
Michael Knox Beran writes with a strong vocabulary. The work itself is worth reading for some of the fascinating insight into Jefferson's views on Greek mythology, the poetic and ritualistic ideals of dominance hierarchies; the way Jefferson's personal convictions battled with one another continuously through your his life, etc.
If you've read books on Jefferson and want one narrowly tailored to his emotional character (and less focused on him as an historic figure or political statue) this is worthwhile in all regards. Read in conjunction with or after AB's Portrait of a Grieving Optimist.
I found out about this book through a footnote in Beran's other book, a study of Robert Kennedy and the American aristocracy.
Michael Knox Beran writes with a strong vocabulary. The work itself is worth reading for some of the fascinating insight into Jefferson's views on Greek mythology, the poetic and ritualistic ideals of dominance hierarchies; the way Jefferson's personal convictions battled with one another continuously through your his life, etc.
If you've read books on Jefferson and want one narrowly tailored to his emotional character (and less focused on him as an historic figure or political statue) this is worthwhile in all regards. Read in conjunction with or after AB's Portrait of a Grieving Optimist.
I found out about this book through a footnote in Beran's other book, a study of Robert Kennedy and the American aristocracy.
March 7, 2017
Great book with a lot of little details about Jefferson. Not a huge game changer in terms of changing how we view Jefferson and the language does get unnecessarily complicated.
Would recommend it as you do learn a lot about how Jefferson arrived at his philosophy by going though a lot of European lore and pagan traditions. Vey cool. Block out the time.
Would recommend also An Imperfect God which is about George Washington which also provides insight on our founding thought process
Would recommend it as you do learn a lot about how Jefferson arrived at his philosophy by going though a lot of European lore and pagan traditions. Vey cool. Block out the time.
Would recommend also An Imperfect God which is about George Washington which also provides insight on our founding thought process
September 4, 2012
A short book without much to say. All the requisite research is in place to show that Jefferson was an introspective thinker with a melancholy streak. I already knew that from more interesting and comprehensive books. The areas covered in this book have all been done before, and in more detail: the Jefferson-Hamilton contrast, the book-collecting, the Sally Hemings scandal. Beyond simply boring, Beran doesn't connect any of these topics to his original thesis. This isn't a "portrait of a restless mind"; it's a survey of a President who occasionally felt restless.
If this book succeeds at showing Jefferson's melancholy side, it fails pitifully at showing what effect it had on Jeffersonian policy. It's an obvious shortcoming, and all the more annoying for that. Jefferson, in this book, has his melancholy fits in his spare time, then gets ahold of himself and goes about his Presidential business. Whether or not that is historically accurate, it does call into question the necessity of this study.
In keeping with his subject matter, Beran affects a prissy, contrived voice that grates. The sense is one of style over substance- without much style.
Beran ought not be faulted for his intentions. I think he wanted to contribute to the body of Jeffersonian history, even at the risk of scraping the barrel. However, I didn't find anything particularly important or revealing in this book.
If this book succeeds at showing Jefferson's melancholy side, it fails pitifully at showing what effect it had on Jeffersonian policy. It's an obvious shortcoming, and all the more annoying for that. Jefferson, in this book, has his melancholy fits in his spare time, then gets ahold of himself and goes about his Presidential business. Whether or not that is historically accurate, it does call into question the necessity of this study.
In keeping with his subject matter, Beran affects a prissy, contrived voice that grates. The sense is one of style over substance- without much style.
Beran ought not be faulted for his intentions. I think he wanted to contribute to the body of Jeffersonian history, even at the risk of scraping the barrel. However, I didn't find anything particularly important or revealing in this book.
June 4, 2009
An interesting insight into the anti-federalist movement and the birth of the two-party system from the perspective of Jefferson portrayed as a petulant drama queen. Who said presidents were boring?
July 26, 2011
Generally a very interesting read. However, by the end my personal ennui was his use of the term ennui!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews