Total Page : 512
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
Publication Date : 2009 04 30
>> Never received my refund
I received an e mail stating that my order had been shipped Several days later I received another e mail saying the book was out of stock and that I would get my full refund within 10 business days It has been 30 days and still no refund I tried to contact the seller and have yet to hear back from them I will be reporting the seller to amazon
>> American Lion
Now I wish I had known the author was the editor to Newsweek and NY times guy While I must admit that the book does contain well written fascinating details about an American icon I wish I had read who the author was before buying it I got to page 132 and realized that I was reading a far left Liberal s interpretation of this larger than life figure I was becoming angry because after having read Franklin s Washington s Lincoln s S Adam s biographies I had set myself up thinking I was about to read a non bias fact based book about Jackson Wrong was I Yes some times the author manages to make you wonder and believe he is speaking objectively until he gets to certain issues and topics Then his Liberal tendencies start running a muck Sorta killed it for me after a while I would suggest a different book I got it cause it was cheap and on sale at Costco Would ve paid more though to have read a biography from someone who wrote it from a historical objective point of view Ruined the experience
>> The first progressive President
Jon Meacham s well written American Lion provides a highly detailed insight into the goings on in Andrew Jackson s White House It seems the Jackson presidency was characterised by an intricate intertwining between politics and family affairs and in that respect the narrative makes some of the most fascinating reading of any biography I have read Unfortunately and far less unique the author s present day views of past rights and wrongs tend to inflitrate his subject matter skewering what could have been an objective review of this important chapter of US history Thus for instance the author repeats the fallacy or at the very least the oversimplification that the preservation of slavery was the cause of the Civil War He agrees that the Tariff of Abomination was just that to the southern States and calls the South s opposition to it legitimate but stops short of saying that the South had cause to mistrust the North s motives and machinations which would eventually lead to the South s secession Northern machinations well before 1860 included so called internal improvements as well as the moneyed interests behind them that Jackson actively fought while the author correctly states that these most benefited the western and middle States in fact they also enriched the North at the expense of Southern taxpayers who disproportionately paid for them while being denied the benefits Mr Meacham is bending over backwards to avoid giving any hint of credit to the Southern cause Another irksome detail is that he decries slavery in the usual terms but decidedly glosses over the unsavory aspects were there any other of the Indian removal that John Ehle s Trail of Tears so harrowingly chronicles Mr Meacham likes Andrew Jackson because he favored both the notion of dominant indivisible Union as well as limited government We know how that turned out the first was bought at the cost of 600 000 American lives not counting civilians and on the second we can at least all agree that it s a thing of the past in America just like in Europe The author of this powerful biography casts Jackson as a progressive in the Roosevelt Wilson FDR tradition If true it is a sad epitaph for this remarkable if not uncontroversial President
