"In the brief-biography arena, essayist Hitchens' Jefferson vies with historian Joyce Appleby's Thomas Jefferson (2003) for the loyalty of the time-challenged reader. Hitchens brings his inimitable style of coruscating precision to Jefferson's ambiguities, which have long provoked disparate opinions. Hitchens gives no quarter on the way Jefferson contradicted himself on slavery, but eschewing easy condemnation, wishes Jefferson were less diffident against it: in any case, he ***extols Jefferson's bolder achievements (e.g., against state-sanctioned religion) that ensured that the American Revolution "was to be truly a change of system and not a change of master***."
This admiration girds Hitchens' assertion that Jefferson was the author of America, citing as proof the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson's presidency. Imaginative without being inventive, Hitchens is the rare author who can prune a complicated life such as Jefferson's to reveal its salient characteristics." Gilbert Taylor
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