ALEXANDER HAMILTON, American
Alexander Hamilton is one of the least understood, most important, and most impassioned and inspiring of the founding fathers. At last Hamilton has found a modern biographer who can bring him to full-blooded life; Richard Brookhiser. In these pages, Alexander Hamilton sheds his skewed image as the "bastard brat of a Scotch peddler," sex scandal survivor, and notoriously doomed dueling partner of Aaron Burr. Examined up close, throughout his meteoric and ever-fascinating (if tragically brief) life, Hamilton can at last be seen as one of the most crucial of the founders. Here, thanks to Brookhiser's accustomed wit and grace, this quintessential American lives again.
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Buy from us:
- Free Press |
- 256 pages |
- ISBN 9781439135457 |
- April 2011
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Praise
“James Grant The Wall Street Journal [A] wonderful portrait....Mr. Brookhiser has put his own intelligent stamp on the life of a great man. ”
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“James Grant The Wall Street Journal [A] wonderful portrait....Mr. Brookhiser has put his own intelligent stamp on the life of a great man. ”
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“Orlando Patterson National Review Richard Brookhiser's splendid biography...succeeds in doing what no other work has quite done before: provide a portrait of Hamilton that brings out the true genius of the man in a volume that is both elegantly written and accessible to a mass audience. ”
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“Gary H. Rawlins USA Today A pithy and entertaining biography....In this bold reinterpretive study that throws down the gauntlet to Jefferson's disciples, Brookhiser ably pleads Hamilton's case before the bar of history....The author's achievement is to capture the full nature of a great but flawed man. ”
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“Michael R. Beschloss The New York Times Book Review A dramatic, compact biography that fairly gallops through Hamilton's picaresque life. Alexander Hamilton, American brilliantly succeeds in arguing that Hamilton deserves greater credit than he usually gets for his brainpower, idealism, and vision. ”
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
St. Croix/Manhattan
In the late eighteenth century, Bryan Edwards, a Jamaican author, inserted this description into a reference work on the West Indies. "The nights" in summer "are transcendantally beautiful. The clearness of the heavens, the serenity of the air, and the soft tranquility in which Nature reposes contribute to harmonize the mind, and produce the most calm and delightful sensations. The moon too in these climates displays far greater radiance than in Europe: the smallest print is legible by her light; and in the moon's absence her function is not ill-supplied by the...
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