Ben

I???m on a mission to read one biography of every president, I???m well aware that the earlier ones do not hold up as models of modern ethics or inclusion, Jackson was not one of the better ones in that respect. I knew that going in. My objections are not with the subject, but with the author.

This book was written in 2005. That???s far too late for a lot of the things that were said. Jackson was described as a kind but firm master to the slaves he owned (I wonder if the slaves saw it that way?) he is described as being definitively not racist toward Native Americans because he adopted and raised a Native American boy (after slaughtering his entire village). Violence between Native Americans and white settlers are portrayed sheerly as aggression by savages toward peace loving civilized European settlers. Indigenous peoples are never - not once! - called Native American, usually Indians is used but once simply as red men. Distinctions between tribes are rarely made. The Trail of Tears is a page and a half followed by ???but really he didn???t have any choice and anyway it???s not like it???s racism??? for three pages. The best? A direct quote from a discussion of the black market in imported slaves ???Purchasers got what they wanted: cheap slaves. Sellers got what they wanted: profits. No one suffered, except perhaps the slaves.???

PERHAPS??? EXCUSE ME???

Like I said, I???ve read lots of these now, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all owned slaves. Adams pere, while an abolitionist, didn???t come to that stance from a conviction of racial equality. Their biographers did the hard work of calling hypocrisy when needed, using the preferred terms for the subjugated peoples in question, and taking a nuanced look at the triumphs and moral failings of their subjects. This one.... didn???t.

This was a good intro for somebody looking to know more about the political structure of the Third Reich, especially since it was organized around ???characters.??? I knocked off a star in my rating only because it felt like nothing happened after Hitler???s suicide. The entire captivity of his lieutenants and the Nuremberg trials only got three pages.

This was excellent. Highly informative, and so well written that it was like baiting a favorite and very cool professor into rambling about the topic of his dissertation for a long, lazy class period.

I knocked off a star for two reasons. One is that there were times that the book assumed that I knew things that I didn???t. There were phrases like ???by this time, of course, Mussolini had been captured.??? Um. Ok, when, how, and by whom? If it was important enough to mention, it was important enough to explain.

The other is that this telling was largely military history. There were lots of discussions about this operation or that battle, which is necessary. But I felt like I was missing the things that Hitler and his functionaries were involved in on a day to day basis. Propaganda? Politics? General management? There were people who warranted a death sentence at Nuremberg who were mentioned for the first time in that context. So I felt like I learned a lot about World War II but very little about Nazi Germany. Which is fine, but it wasn???t the book I was looking for.

So basically I???d say that I would absolutely recommend this book to someone interested in embarking on a serious study of Nazi Germany and World War II. I would not recommend that this be the first book they read in pursuit of that project