| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind. By Michael Knox Beran. (New York: Free Press, 2003. xxii, 265 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-7432-3279-8.)

This is a strange book to review. Michael Knox Beran is not a historian, and Jefferson's Demons does not qualify as history. It is a meditation, richly embroidered with classical allusions. Beran's Thomas Jefferson exists in Persepolis at least as much as he inhabits the eighteenth-century political world. Indeed, the "demons" of the title really refer to the genii (or manes) of the Greek and Roman literary imagination; the author describes a demon as "a spirit allotted to a man at birth, a sprite or ghost that helped to determine the man's character or fortune" (p. 99). In Jefferson's case, his demons, his "good voices" (p. 102), drove him to act and inspired him to embrace republican principles.

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