Skip to main content

The Forgotten Founding Father



James Madison seems to be getting his due these days.  Three new biographies have come out in the past year, including a succinct version by Richard Brookhiser, that has garnered much praise.  Others by Kevin Gutzman and Jeff Broadwater weigh in at a few more pages, which leads one to ponder when David McCollough or H.W. Brands will weigh in on Madison.  He is certainly a founding father worthy of more consideration.

Comments

  1. I see Ralph Ketcham gave Madison his full due back int 1990, but I think I will probably go with Brookhiser biography, especially since I can read Ketcham online,

    http://books.google.lt/books?id=hCAjgs4mmQ4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=james+madison+biography&hl=en&sa=X&ei=N-fBT4OqBZDBswazpIHUCg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=james%20madison%20biography&f=false

    ReplyDelete
  2. Didn't we read a bio of Madison here?

    Oh .... I just typed that and see Garry Wills' book, right next to the comment box.

    I am a big fan of Madison. Robert always referred to him as little Jimmy Madison. I looked at the links, and Rove endorses him (Brookhiser, not Madison) so what the heck?

    (A commenter at Amazon has a goal of reading a bio of all the presidents in order. That sounds like something I would try to do.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Speaking of Robert and presidential bios, any word from him?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sadly, no. I wrote to him a couple weeks ago to let him know we were taking up Caro's latest book, but no response.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005