I wish that I could rate this book 3.5 stars, but since that option is not available, I chose 3 stars. The reason for this rating is the quality of the writing. It is not poorly written, but it is not well written. The author opens by giving the names of Monroe’s mother and father. He tells when the father died but nothing is mentioned of the fate of the mother. He discusses the birth of Monroe’s first child and later he mentions Monroe, his wife and two children embarking for England. I had to research online to find out when the second child was born. He mentions that there were four presidential candidates in the 1824 election, but never bothers to state who were the four. The book is smattered with such instances of the author mentioning people and incidents and never giving a full account of the relevant details associated with them.
Despite the quality of the writing, I still enjoyed the book. Although some information was missing, it still contained a wealth of information about this man and the era in which he lived. But more importantly I was impressed by the extraordinary decency of Monroe. To me he is the Harry Truman of the Founding Fathers – highly intelligent but not given to pondering abstract concepts as were his predecessors. Instead he was driven more by the development of the practical means for implementing the objectives of the nation as defined by those abstract concepts. Like Truman he was a very congenial man but he did not possess the overpowering presence of his predecessors, he, however, did possess a work ethic and a devotion to the country and to morality equal to any of his predecessors. Almost everyone knows the Monroe Doctrine, that is, that the United States would not tolerate European countries interfering with the independent governments in the Americas and that it declared that North and South America were no longer open to colonization, but I was unaware of the other many accomplishments of this man, one example is that his presidency was defined as the “Era of Good Feelings”. In the last paragraph of the book, John Quincy Adams, lists Monroe’s many accomplishments and ends with this statement, “Thus strengthening and consolidating the federative edifice of his country’s union, till he was entitled to say, like Augustus Caesar of his imperial city, that he found her built of brick and left her constructed of marble.”
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Arrakis
James Monroe : de révolutionnaire à Président des USA
Reviewed in France on January 3, 2020
