Jackson: A Novel

In "Jackson, Max Byrd has recreated the life and times of this powerful, controversial, and contradictory man told from a variety of viewpoints, including an unfinished and uncomplimentary biography of the General, a remembrance by his closest personal aide and confidant, and the research of a young writer named David Chase. Chase knows very well that his biography could ruin Jackson's chances in the upcoming presidential election. Still, he is determined to write the first unbiased account of the General's life. Was Jackson really a charismatic demagogue, a crude backwoods barbarian, a representative of the decline of American democracy? Or was there something more behind the public image of war hero, campaign buttons, and emotionally-charged rhetoric? What is revealed is a man even more contradictory than the rumors told about him. Here is a Jackson both savagely honest and politically cunning, a self-made man who always longed to belong, an orphaned boy who grew up with an untamed fury for respect and honor, a man as tough as the Tennessee wilderness from which he came.

With sharply drawn vignettes of suchnotable figures as John Quincy Adams, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Houston, and others, "Jackson is an unforgettable portrait of an America in transition and a man as dangerous as democracy itself. Less