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Book of the week

Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson

by Alan Pell Crawford

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(Random House, $27)

Thomas Jefferson lived the final 17 years of his life in a financial fantasy world. A vital 65 when he completed his second term as president, the revered Founder had begun spending beyond his means even before he arrived home to his Northern Virginia estate. No expense daunted him—rare books for his library, guitars and silk dresses for the grandchildren, a new stairway connecting his bedroom to the nearby slave quarters inhabited by Sally Hemings. Jefferson died, in 1826, surrounded by family members who had no hope of financial recovery. After creditors sold off his 130 slaves, his debts stood at $150,000, or more than 20 times what the sale of Monticello would fetch five years later. That doesn’t even count the $6,000 that the retired chief executive had swindled from a friend.

“There is a poignant, almost King Lear quality” to the Jefferson portrayed in Alan Pell Crawford’s gracious but uncompromising new book, said Aram Bakshian Jr. in The Wall Street Journal. Jefferson was hardly blind to the untenability of his financial situation, and the pressure to stay afloat may be part of the reason he so often fell short of his stated ideals: Instead of joining those who advocated the emancipation of slaves, for instance, Jefferson argued for letting slavery expand into new territories so that it might die from “diffusion.” A national recession hit many Virginia planters hard in the first decades of the 19th century, said Doug Childers in the Richmond, Va., Times-Dispatch. It’s actually a tribute to Jefferson’s character that he maintained his “trademark optimism and intellectual curiosity” despite his sinking fortunes.

Crawford could have written a more tough-minded book, said Michael Grunwald in The Washington Post. Structurally, Twilight at Monticello “is a mess,” and it devotes far too many pages to re-creating “the relatively boring daily routine” of Jefferson’s home life. Even so, Crawford deserves credit for finding a new angle on the author of the Declaration of Independence and letting the facts he’s discovered speak for themselves. Crawford’s Jefferson is inescapably an “irresponsible, self-serving, and self-deluded man.” But perhaps if we stop trying to preserve Jefferson’s image as a flawless sage, we will be better able to celebrate the ideals he represented.

Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America

by Richard Zoglin

(Bloomsbury, $25)

Lenny Bruce wasn’t the kind of comedian that middle-class kids like Richard Zoglin listened to on their home stereos. Bruce was a creature of the clubs—legendarily foulmouthed and difficult. But soon after Bruce died at 40, in 1966, of a morphine overdose, a new generation carried his mantle into households everywhere. Mainstream star George Carlin grew out his hair and started telling Vietnam jokes. Richard Pryor looked out at one of his Vegas audiences in 1967, delivered one line—“What the f--- am I doing here?”—and walked offstage. Safe comedy was over. Profanity and uncomfortable truths were in. Carlin and Pryor were the catalysts, Zoglin says, but a wave of like-minded performers was coming. Together, he says, these rebels changed the way Americans viewed “everything from presidential politics” to the humdrum events of everyday life.

Zoglin’s “entertaining but somewhat overreaching” account of stand-up’s transformation “breezily tracks the biggest names” that emerged in the decade after Bruce’s death, said Erik Himmelsbach in the Los Angeles Times. Steve Martin, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, and plenty of other big stars granted interviews to Zoglin, and the Time veteran uses them to create “an intimate glimpse through the keyhole” of an oddball subculture that gradually infiltrated the American mainstream. Other books have touched on this subject, but “Zoglin has a handle on it that no one else has had,” said Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News. The stand-up bits that he reproduces will have you “howling frequently with laughter.” If you’re willing to give his thesis a chance, you just might come away convinced that Bruce’s heirs are responsible for the skeptical, ironic tilt of today’s American culture.

Zoglin doesn’t whitewash the scene’s dark side, said J. Max Robins in The Wall Street Journal. “We hear about the sexcapades, booze, and mountains of cocaine that fueled some careers and destroyed others.” Thirty years into stand-up’s “running fascination with mundanity,” said Saul Austerlitz in The Boston Globe, Zoglin is fighting an uphill battle in trying to convince readers that either the young Albert Brooks or Robert Klein was once a leader of a “dangerous” movement. At its best, though, Comedy at the Edge is “a potent reminder of just how magnificent” their revolutionary period was.