Book Review

Comparative/World

Stuart Andrews writes well, can tell an engaging story, and tells many here. His vivid style brings to life an important slice of elite transatlantic culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This story, told in sixteen chapters of ten or eleven pages each, is about various American, English, and French authors who lived during the years surrounding the American and French Revolutions. Andrews weaves together twenty or so short biographies to create a tapestry depicting the lives of some of those who, during these years migrated back and forth between their homelands and the new American nation.

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Andrews breaks his account into five sections: an introduction, "Founding Fathers in Europe," "Transatlantic Citizens," "Frenchmen in America," and "Images and Visions." The first two sections, unlike those that follow, are disappointing and fail to reflect the strengths of this work. Rather, they expose its weaknesses. In them, Andrews writes about Americans (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams) and, in the briefest of terms, about the ideological background that colored America's rupture with England. Here Andrews explains that the ideology of the American Revolution and the thinking of the Founding Fathers were both products of the Enlightenment. This, however, he declares without credible evidence and seeminly without an awareness that in the past quarter century such claims have been powerfully and, according to many, successfully contested.

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