This is not as good a work as it had the potential of being. At 199 pages it is short, made shorter still by small pages with large type.

Bouncing from topic to topic, it is an uncoordinated effort. It appears to have been rushed. There are so many ibids and multiple referrals to the same source material in the bibliography that you begin to wonder just how much work went into the research behind it. I was sorry I purchased it.

I enjoyed "Seduced by the West," though it's a quick read that is more of a lengthy magazine article than really a book.

The books focuses on various efforts to explore and claim the American West including, but not limited to, Lewis & Clark.

The most interesting aspect of the book is the description of various characters, e.g., General James Wilkinson. Wilkinson was supposed to be representing US interests in the ill-defined Louisiana Territories, but he was also apparently being paid by the Spanish. The Spanish, intriguingly, didn't recognize the Louisiana Purchase as their deal to turn Louisiana over to the French had a codicil that it wasn't to be sold to someone else.

I would have preferred the book if it had been more specifically focused on a character like Wilkinson and therefore would have been less of a historical review.

But, within the context of what "Seduced by the West" is, it's an enjoyable read.

I feel like I have just had my pocket picked. The title is totally misleading because this book barely mentions the subject. It not worth the time spent reading it.

At first, the author's trenchant remarks promised to add spice to what I feared would be the intimidating proces of learning some basic calculus. As it turned out, the book is not really about learning calculus so much as it is about the history of calculus and related mathematical subjects-- a fine topic in its own right, though not the one I had hoped to find in a book with this title. Unfortunately, even this interesting information is itself compromised by the author's unrelenting use of "humorous" comments (most with a snickery, knowing slant) which, in more judicious doses, might have been engaging.

If your looking for a conventional book on mathematics, Jefferson Hane's Conquering Calculus is not for you. He intentionally takes a different approach, using humorous comparisons and real world analogies which may offend those without a good sense of humor.

While his use of humor can be debated, his explanations shed new light on difficult mathmatical concepts. His straight forward approach sucessfully lays the groundwork on which to build a deeper understanding of difficult concepts.

Mathmatics tends to be a very dry subject. I have purchased other books on calculus with the intent on learning only to set them aside after the first dull chapter. Although other books may be more thorough in their coverage, they are too stiff to sufficiently stimulate interest. A light and humerous approach is a welcome change.

I only wish that more authors and teachers had the insight to relate mathmatics and other topics to others in a light and humours manner.

It seemed like such a good concept -- parallel bios of the two great antagonists of the Civil War. However, after a promising beginning, this book becomes so wildly inaccurate and in parts so "Oliver Stone-ish" that I personally will submit my copy for recycling rather than allow anyone else to read it. Some errors are errors of detail (the General commanding the Confederate troops on Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg was James Longstreet, not "Stonewall" Jackson). Some are chronological. Chadwick places Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign after the Seven Days' battles, where in reality it was the indispensible prelude. Sometimes the chronology becomes so muddled that events seem to occur twice. The way the text reads, it seems that Union General John Pope was beaten at Second Bull Run twice. And can anyone truly imagine Salmon Chase leading Union forces in the field?

I was particularly disturbed by the assertion that Ohio "Peace Democrat" Clement Vallandigham was arrested on President Lincoln's authority. Every other source I've ever seen asserts that General Burnside acted without any authority other than his own, and that he quickly received orders to arrest no other politicians and suppress no more newspapers without consulting Washington first. What evidence did Chadwick find that eluded Allen Nevins, Shelby Foote, and Stephen B. Oates (to name but three) missed?

When Chadwick comes to the Kilpatrick/Dahlgren raid to Richmond, things get very worrisome for anyone who's read much Civil War history (and I have). No one else that I have have read has ever asserted that the raid's purported goal of killing or kidnapping Jefferson Davis and/or other members of his administration was authorized by Abraham Lincoln himself. What evidence has Chadwick unearthed that hundreds if not thousands of other historians had never found? In addition, Chadwick is the only author that I have read that flatly pronounces the papers purportedly found on Ulric Dahlgren's body genuine. All others have at least acknowledged the possibility that they were forgeries. (For the record, incidently, Judson Kilpatrick's not-too-flattering nickname was "Kill Cavalry", not "Kill Patrick".)

I gave up on this book at page 340. My time is too precious to waste it on conspiritorial pseudo-history. I'll bet yours is , too.

Where's the Beef?

With all of the attention lavished by historians on Abraham Lincoln, and with the growing number of works on Jefferson Davis, it is curious that there have been so few comparative studies of the two men. Aside from Bruce Catton's Two Roads To Fort Sumter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), and a few scattered articles and monographs, no scholar of the Civil War has attempted a comprehensive, systematic comparison of Lincoln and Davis. Bruce Chadwick has attempted to fill this hole with The Two American Presidents.

As the title suggests, this is a dual biography, a two-track narrative which switches back and forth between Lincoln's and Davis's stories. These twin narratives are not bad history in the sense of being inaccurate or sloppy. Chadwick wrote competently and with occasional dramatic flair, he made good use of the available primary sources, and he utilized an impressive amount of newspaper research. A casual reader without much prior knowledge of the Civil War could read The Two American Presidents and come away with a basic understanding of each man's life and career.

But Chadwick really unearthed nothing new about either man; his book is for the most part merely a pedestrian rehashing of oft-told tales. His story of Lincoln follows the standard arc which one could find in a dozen other biographies: Lincoln the savvy politician and prairie lawyer with the large measure of common sense who is smarter than most everyone around him, and who is dedicated to finding a pragmatic means to the idealistic end of killing slavery and establishing a new birth of freedom. Likewise, Chadwick's Jefferson Davis is not very original: he is the Calhounian planter and Mexican war hero who never questions slavery; a principled yet rigid man who relentlessly pursues Confederate victory but is hobbled by serious character flaws and political ineptitude. Chadwick's narrative is sprightly, but in the end this is still old wine in a new bottle. It is so old, in fact, that I found very little material worthy of substantive criticism; hence the brevity of this review.

According to the book's dust jacket, Chadwick argues that "one of several reasons why the North won and the South lost can be found in the drastically different characters of the two presidents." This is perhaps a reasonable--though by no means foregone--conclusion. It is not the "fascinating new perspective" and "startling answers" the book's jacket claims; Davis Potter made this exact argument forty years ago in a widely read essay which Chadwick does not cite (see Potter, "Jefferson Davis and the Political Factors of Confederate Defeat," in David Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War [New York: Collier, 1960]).

But where does Chadwick draw these conclusions, let alone support them with evidence? I have quoted the book jacket at some length because in 490 pages of text I was unable to locate anything resembling an actual argument. The Two Presidents is a comparative study with no substantive comparative analysis. Chadwick seems to have assumed that the mere placing of a mediocre biography of Davis and a mediocre biography of Lincoln within the same cover somehow constitutes an "argument," an original contribution. It does not.

Chadwick somehow missed the point of his own book. The only value such a study might possess would lie in the new light it shed on either Lincoln and Davis themselves, or on larger subjects -- presidential leadership, for example -- which are illuminated by but transcend the two men's individual stories. Chadwick did neither, and in the end wrote a book which is of little real value to serious scholars of Lincoln, Davis or the Civil War.

Reviewed by Brian Dirck, Assistant Professor of History, Anderson University . Published by H-South (September, 2000)

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I am sure people who are interested in the American history of the latter part of the 19th century will find this book useful.

Although this work was officially written by Lance Banning, there is no mistake that it is an outgrowth of the theories of J.G.A. Pocock. Essentially, Banning tries to make the case that the Jeffersonian Republicans were the American version of Bolingbroke's "Country Party." Moreover, he tries to demonstrate how the party advocated the classical republican values of "civic humanism." Ultimately, the book falls flat on its face. Anyone acquanted with Jefferson, as well as his party, should be able to see right through Banning's account. Although there certainly were classical republican elements in their thought, these were only secondary and complimentary to the libertarian theories of natural rights and individualism. A more accurate (although still deeply flawed) account is Joyce Appleby's work "Capitalism and a New Social Order:The Republican Vision of the 1790's."

This is an attempt to understand the psychology of the late 18th century Virginia gentry by exploring the writings of some of its more prominent male menbers. Lockridge culls his evidence from the commonplace books of Thomas Jefferson and William Byrd, in which the subjects collected jokes, quotations, and parables that they found to be particularly illuminative. While Lockridge acknowledges that the perspectives of two men cannot be wholly transferable to their entire class, he hopes that his subjects are representational enough that some insight into the general beliefs of the gentry can be found in their writings. However, by focusing on narrow periods in the authors' lives in a strictly constructed context, while adding a heavy dose of his own (questionable) psychoanalysis, Lockridge excludes much evidence that could provide a more balanced assesment of gentry values.

Lockridge rests his case on the belief that the personality failings of Jefferson and Byrd were somehow representational of a broad misogynistic conviction among upper-class Virginia men. While continuously undermining his own argument by admitting that among the scores of commonplaces he has read, he found nothing similar to the "misogynistic rage" uncovered in the writings of these two men, he is nonetheless certain that these aberrations were somehow deeply reflective of true patriarchal hatred for women. Despite the fact that his own sources make clear that these expressions of misogyny appeared in response to personal failures with women (Byrd was spurned in romance, and Jefferson was unhappily controlled by his mother during his rebellious teenage years) Lockridge argues that it is not enough to agree that these outbursts were reflective of bad personal experiences with women, but that we need to "understand what mental categories are invoked on such an occasion." Understanding what Lockridge means by this would be far more enlightening, however. He goes on to insist that because entries concerning women appear in the same time frame as those about power and rebellion, they must be indisputably connected in the authors' minds, despite the fact that the two men had much to say about these themes in other contexts.

Despite the problems in the work, the conclusions Lockridge ultimately draws about patriarchy are rather convincing, though more concrete evidence than he has presented would be required to prove them. He argues that rather than fearing women for their sexual or political power, it was economic control that most consternated gentrymen, as widows had the ability to control their own property (though Jefferson's attempts to change the legal code so that females could inherit property from their parents would seem to contradict the idea that he personally felt this way.)

Lockridge claims that the point of his study was simply to show that males were under pressure from women because female economic power had the potential to undermine male hegemony in controlling the structure of their newly created world. This is certainly a valid and interesting point; it is thus all the more unfortunate that the body of his essay does little to reinforce it.

The idea that the U.S. did not mean to or even seek to take Indian land is prepostorous. It is obvious in looking at The Trail of Tears that all along the U.S. Gov't wanted to take land, no matter how civilized a society the Cherokees became.

Well written but gets boring reading the same old rehash warmed over with a different person's opinions. Nothing new here, I'm afraid, just a repeat.

Don't waste your time (or money). This book is almost as poorly written as it is poorly cited. The author obviously had no editor. There are nearly a half-dozen better choices if you want reliable information on Jefferson and the slavery connection.

The author asserts that Jefferson begot children with his slave and reminds the reader that this was not usual or shocking behavior for many antebellum Southern men. This book is amusing because of it's high spirited, conversational style and because of it's flaws. It could've been a very good book if only Mr. Sloan had sought out the services of a copy/content editor. The technical problems with the book are just too distracting.

The allegation that Thomas Jefferson was the father of children by his slave, Sally Hemings, was published in a Richmond, Va. newspaper in 1802. In a bumpy read (the writing style ranges from breezy to turgid), Sloan's book is typical of what is becoming an "attack the famous" genre. He offers no new scholarship and skirts around the lack of any direct evidence to support his theme. Sally Hemings was about 14 years old when she travelled to Paris as the maid to Jefferson's youngest daughter. The rumor started by the newspaper charge is that she became pregnant and returned to Monticello to have Jefferson's child. Apparently the author was unaware, when he published this book, that DNA testing was being conducted that ruled out Jefferson as the father. During the period from 1795 to 1808, Sally had four children that lived and Sloan claims Jefferson paternity for all of them. He does not explain, nor have other purveyors of the myth, why no one who observed this Jefferson-Hemings relationship ever made a statement about it during Jefferson's life. This includes his daughters, his grandchildren, brother, sister, and nephews, many of whom resided at Monticello during these years. It also included Sally's two brothers James and Bob, who were freed in the 90's, and her son and daughter who ran away in 1822, as well as two of her sons, a brother, and two nephews who were freed by Jeffersons's will. Imagine how important Sally would have been at Monticello as Jefferson's long time mistress, virtually his wife, yet not one word remains to describe her. She is an historical cipher. The author has clearly read extensively on the subject, but if you are looking for a documented history, this is not your book. Sloan even admits that he "is not impressed with footnotes." It is also hard to have confidence in a book that cites two of the books in Dumas Malone's six volume biography, but not the two with the genealogical information and the special appendix on the Hemings issue. Sloan could have benefitted from an editor. This has all the faults of a self published book. But, if you are looking for rumor and innuendo, it's all here.

Although easy enough to read and laced with numerous Jeffersonian quotations, this book, on balance, is far more concerned with Professor Sheldon's appraisal of contemporary society than it is with the opinions of the nation's third president. Sheldon's conservative Christian viewpoint is obvious and gives rise to the legitimate concern that he may have been quite selective in his use of substantiating information, employing only those facts which are consistent with his own stance on issues while creating the illusion that he is presenting the reader with an unbiased perspective. Some of his "supportive evidence" is anecdotal and may very well have no basis in fact. For example, twice Sheldon mentions a comparison of surveys regarding educational problems in 1940 and 1990 in an attempt to prove a decline in educational and moral standards. These "surveys," however, are a fiction concocted by former Ft. Worth businessman T. Cullen Davis, an evangelical Christian who has openly admitted that he created the poll out of his own imagination in order to advance his personal views. Professor Sheldon may very well have done much the same thing. Lack of precise supportive documentation is the most disturbing feature of this book. Virtually nowhere is it possible for the reader to easily verify the accuracy of what the author states or to learn the context from which quoted remarks are taken. Given Sheldon's obvious bias, a reader who wants a more scholarly, objective account of Thomas Jefferson's thoughts would be well advised to look elsewhere, like Joseph Ellis's "American Sphinx."

I have read over a 1/2 dozen books about Thomas Jefferson and "What would Jefferson say?" rates dead last. Sheldon's most poorly written chapters appear to be out of the area of his expertise. The book has some glaring errors in scientific discussions. It's obvious the author is not a scientist. He does a better job on chapters dealing with economics and Jefferson's character. He totally drops the ball in his chapter about Jefferson and science. Sheldon believes that Jefferson would reject evolution. He writes "...radical evolution holds that the world and it's species develop out of themselves, internally, not out of an external creator". Thus, Jefferson, who was a deistic scientist, would reject evolution. The quote is a false statement and shows the author's ignorance of science. True science does not have an opinion on things it cannot observe. It only attempts to explain what it can observe, therefore true science is open to the theory of natural evolution being born out of a creator. However, at this time such a theory cannot be tested or proved. Sheldon also quotes evolutionary scientist, Dr. Stephen Gould, grossly out of context. Gould would be furious to see how Sheldon has misused those writings. Something smells fishy. What is the author's hidden agenda here? I believe Jefferson, the true scientist he was, would side with the vast majority of scientists and accept evolution. In conclusion, I feel Jefferson would be proud that in only 200 years we have become the greatest nation on earth surpassing empires built over thousands of years. I do believe Jefferson, who hoped that U.S. citizens would eventually turn Unitarian would be disappointed that there is still so much superstition in the U.S. Jefferson saw knowledge as light, and superstition and ignorance as darkness. So what would Jefferson say about the book "What would Jefferson say?" I believe he would say the same thing he said about the Bible. He would call it a "dung hill." Sheldon corrupts Jefferson's beliefs in the same way Jefferson believed the Bible was corrupt. They were both put together to manipulate the uneducated. Sheldon makes Thomas Jefferson sound like Pat Robertson who, I have little doubt, Jefferson would have despised. For anyone who really wants to learn about Jefferson, I recommend reading "Jefferson and Religion" by Eugene R. Sheridan. Leave Sheldon's book to those who want to lie to themselves and make Jefferson into something he was not.

Attention! Sheldon's views of Jefferson's thought to not reflect on Jefferson's! I could not believe what I was reading when I opened up this book. I hought that Sheldon had at least a relatively firm grasp on Jefferson's thought after reading his book "The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson," I was sorely disappointed. It appears that Sheldon may understand what he thought, but is not able to translate it to the events of today. It is a shame that Sheldon failed in his effort, because such a work as this, properly done, would be wonderful to see. If you truly interested in what Jefferson would think about current events today, let me sum it up for you. He would be outraged and saddened to see what happened to the once great nation that he helped to found. He would be enraged at the tyrannical activities of our government. As for his political leanings, he would most certainly be a radical libertarian.

The book itself is actually OK if what you want is a history of the Beale Papers, but please note that the book does not contain a solution to the ciphers.

Apart from the history of the Beale Treasure, the author goes into an in-depth description of how he discovered "clues" to decode the ciphers. I found the book disappointing because the evidence for these "clues" seems to be quite weak .It seems as though the author is "clutching at straws",looking for evidence which really isn't there. Unfortunately these "clues" only lead to more questionable "evidence". There is certainly no solution to the treasure code given in the book, which is not what the title suggests.