The Passions of Andrew Jackson [Hardcover]

I particularly dislike his arrangement of notes and the lack of a structured list of references. This (lately popular) method of substantiating the facts (or even opinions) in non-fiction books is an insidious attempt to thwart verification. I spent more time recording by hand the references I wished to check than I did actually reading the book. Why not list them in the conventional manner? It makes me suspect, especially when Remini is so cavaliarly dismissed.

Andrew Burstein is an entertaining writer, but this work is just too sloppy to be taken as a serious study of a complicated topic.

Yet, while on the whole, THE PASSIONS OF ANDREW JACKSON is an enjoyable book, it also contains a major disappointment: Burstein's treatment of Jackson's presidency. Burstein set out to write a book about Jackson's character with an emphasis on exploring his friendships. He explicitly did not intend to chronicle Jackson's presidency, so his brief treatment of that part of Jackson's life was not especially surprising. It was, however, disappointing for a number of reasons.

To begin with, Burstein hurls the gauntlet in his introduction at other Jackson biographers, especially "the reigning Jackson authority," Robert Remini. His basic criticism of Remini, who wrote a three-volume biography of Jackson, is that Remini bought into Jacksonian mythology a bit too much. By contrast, Burstein sets as his goal writing about Jackson as he really was. I found the assault on Remini to be odd and out of place. Remini's last volume was published in 1984, so I'm not sure why Burstein felt the need to justify writing a new book. More importantly, by contrasting his own book with Remini's, Burstein suggests a parallelism that doesn't really exist. THE PASSIONS OF ANDREW JACKSON is much more limited in scope than Remini's work. Its focus is almost exclusively on who Jackson was rather than what he did.

Burstein falls short in not explaining enough what Jackson did. He assumes the reader's familiarity with the Jackson record and policy-making style. He alludes to important events associated with Jackson, such as the tragic "trail of tears," without fully explaining Jackson's role. Burstein probably could have done the job with an additional 20 pages, but it almost seems that the author lost interest in his own work at the point Jackson became president. The overall quality of the story degenerates after that. Burstein made his point already, the rest of Jackson's life is glossed over. The final several pages of reflective, explanatory writing seems almost redundant, which is a problem in a short book.

What is Burstein's point? It seems to be that Jackson was an impulsive, violent, unreflective man whose popularity was out of sync with his aptitudes for governing. His success at arousing emotional public support for short-sighted policies was the dark side of democracy. Beyond that, Burstein seems to very subtly be drawing a comparison between Jacksonian era politics and the politics of today, but this point is not developed probably because Burstein wanted his book to last. But by including this implied, under-developed comparison at all he fails to develop other implications, such as the idea that the early founders' elitist republicanism may have been a superior form of governance (another of Burstein's implications). In the end Burstein's only conclusions that stick are about Jackson's character, and not how any of this means anything larger.

The most disappointing aspect of THE PASSIONS OF ANDREW JACKSON is that there hasn't been a well-known popular Jackson biography published for several years. Jackson was too important a figure for "the reigning authority" to keep his crown for 20 years without a new contribution. As enjoyable as THE PASSIONS OF ANDREW JACKSON is, if Remini holds the title, Burstein does not quite pose a threat to win it.