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How long does it take to read Thomas Jefferson?

Jon Meacham

Thomas Jefferson by Jon Meacham takes about 6 hours 10 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 6 hours 10 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2012. 336 pages, about 92,400 words. Written for children.

13 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 10 hours 16 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 6 hours 10 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 51 minutes

The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era. Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power. Thomas Jefferson hated confrontation, and yet his understanding of power and of human nature enabled him to move men and to marshal ideas, to learn from his mistakes, and to prevail. Passionate about many things—women, his family, books, science, architecture, gardens, friends, Monticello, and Paris—Jefferson loved America most, and he strove over and over again, despite fierce opposition, to realize his vision: the creation, survival, and success of popular government in America. Jon Meacham lets us see Jefferson’s world as Jefferson himself saw it, and to appreciate how Jefferson found the means to endure and win in the face of rife partisan division, economic uncertainty, and external threat. Drawing on archives in the United States, England, and France, as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham presents Jefferson as the most successful political leader of the early republic, and perhaps in all of American history. The father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and of the settling of the West, Jefferson recognized that the genius of humanity -- and the genius of the new nation -- lay in the possibility of progress, of discovering the undiscovered and seeking the unknown. From the writing of the Declaration of Independence to elegant dinners in Paris and in the President’s House; from political maneuverings in the boardinghouses and legislative halls of Philadelphia and New York to the infant capital on the…

Subjects: Politics and government, Presidents, Biography, Presidents, united states, United states, politics and government

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