In Pursuit of Jefferson: Traveling through Europe with the Most Perplexing Founding Father (Historical Nonfiction Travel Memoir) Paperback – January 6, 2023

I loved this book. As a public historian for over twenty-five years and someone who likes to travel and visit historic sites, this book combined many of my interests. Baxter manages to balance the history and travel very well. His style is similar to one of my favorite writers, Tony Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes). If you think everything has been written about Thomas Jefferson, think again. Baxter’s book is a fresh take on this icon in American history. The book is fun and insightful – the best part is that Jefferson’s complexity becomes very real to Baxter as his exploration becomes deeper and the reader experiences this right along with Baxter. The author often asks what Jefferson might think of modern issues. It’s impossible to know of course, but fun to consider. From a marathon through the choicest vineyards in France to pasta makers in Italy and revelers in the Netherlands, the author takes the reader on a quest to understand, as the subtitle says, America’s “most perplexing founding father.” Along with the fun, is the author’s realization of the ugliness of slavery and Jefferson’s role in it. Baxter writes in a sensitive way about tough topics and offers a satisfying conclusion. I highly recommend this book.

This book exceeded expectations. I had high hopes for it based on the reviews, but it is even better. Insightful, informative, and humorous, the author does a fantastic job of weaving history, Jefferson, the author's own travels in Europe, wine, food, and a bit more together in a thoroughly enjoyable read.The book operates on several levels: as a travelogue, with discoveries in wine, architecture, food, etc. and as a personal memoir for the author, as he faced and came to terms with middle age and found a way to have new challenges/experiences/dreams despite all the responsibilities that come with that time. The idea for the book came when the author, stumbling around the internet, found a largely unknown Jefferson guide for two friends called “Hints for Americans Traveling in Europe.” Baxter set out to follow in Jefferson’s footsteps over a number of years, not just on his itinerary but on topics to investigate. Best combo travel/history book I’ve read.

I bought this before a trip to Europe but didn’t get far enough into it to read the Europe parts before returning to the States.Nonetheless, it was entertaining enough and easy to read. The author is an admirer of Jefferson at the start, and I believe throughout his journey as he travels the paths of Jefferson but has to come to grips with the dichotomy of Jefferson’s championship of freedom with his practice of owning slaves.So this book has 3 themes, Jefferson’s travels, the morality of Jefferson and lastly his love of food and wine. It also touches on other subjects, including architecture and agriculture subjects for which Jefferson’s intent was to bring back home the best European ideas on these various topics.

This starts out as an entertaining tracing of Thomas Jefferson’s steps through Europe and then proceeds into a serious examination of his involvement with the slave trade and his efforts to maintain his lifestyle and standing in the community of his time. However, the author loses discipline along the way by lapsing into unnecessary modern-day liberal tropes involving, of all things, global warming. While he writes that Jefferson actually recorded rising temperatures during his time, instead of exploring this and making the logical point that prior periods of rising temperatures have taken place he instead, without revealing any of the details of Jefferson’s research and observations of temperatures, just goes off on a tangent that the modern-day world is experiencing unprecedented warm temperatures caused by mankind. It’s as if the author was intrigued enough to mention Jefferson’s climatic observations of rising temperatures over 200 years ago, but his political leanings just could not let them interfere with the present-day party line of man-made global warming and it ends up distracting from the main thrust of the story.

What more could there possibly be to say about one of our most written-about Founding Fathers? Plenty, it turns out! Baxter got intrigued when he stumbled across Jefferson's guide to some proto-backpackers (read: aristocrats doing the Grand Tour), Hints to Americans Traveling Through Europe and, as he was coincidentally the same age Jefferson was during Jefferson's ambassadorship to France, and, not incidentally facing a little mid-life crisis, he decided to pursue Jefferson's interests across the pond.The result is so much fascinating information we never knew about Jefferson, and some we did know but don't like to think about. Baxter embraces Jefferson's wide-ranging "Objects of Attention" in a compulsively readable way, inspiring this reader not just to learn more about the topics but to adopt a stance of learning similar to that of Jefferson—and Baxter.Baxter's treatment of the issue of slavery is unflinching, which says a lot given that the author played the Founding Father in a fourth grade play and attended "Mr. Jefferson's University." He doesn't let hero-worship blind him to Jefferson's terrible treatment of hundreds of human beings, though.Another reviewer called this "preachy," but it isn't. It's an honest and open-hearted look at the reality that Jefferson was not who he purported to be.