Word: flexner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just look at the list. In American politics and history we have James Thomas Flexner on Washington, Dumas Malone on Jefferson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on Robert Kennedy and James MacGregor Burns on Franklin Roosevelt. The British have given us Elizabeth Jenkins on Elizabeth I, Cecil Woodham-Smith on Queen Victoria, Philip Magnus on Gladstone and Edward VII, and Robert Blake on Benjamin Disraeli. In literature there are treasures from both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Ellmann's Joyce, George Painter's Proust and Leon Edel's James are the chief prizes, but there are many other jewels...
...have known that he was born illegitimate in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies, his father the disinherited fourth son of an aristocratic Scots family. That part of the Hamilton story, briefly told, has suggested a certain domestic warmth surrounding the child, and even a hint of affluence. Flexner's research, he says, "turns the accepted story completely upside down. I found not affluence but relative squalor; not warmth but betrayal. Hamilton's home was a shambles." Being illegitimate, Alexander was officially designated an "obscene child." His mother Rachel was evidently something of a slut; before taking...
Like Hamlet and Polonius interpreting the shapes of clouds, psychohistorians tend to find whatever emotional apparitions they need to prove a thesis-as if the Third Reich, for example, could be explained by little Hitler's toilet training. Fortunately, Historian James T. Flexner is temperate and plausible enough in his psychologizing about the young Alexander Hamilton to offer a fascinating new analysis of a precocious and odd career...
...Flexner, author of a magisterial four-volume life of George Washington, believes that this chaotic childhood left Hamilton, for all his brilliance, a strange and scarred man, "by far the most psychologically troubled of the founding fathers." He finds in Hamilton two very different, constantly warring creatures. One is the paragon of eighth-grade history: logical, visionary, very nearly alabaster; the other, "the semimadman who sought from the world an ever-denied release from inner wounds ... The accomplished, smooth and brilliant man of the world could at any moment change hysterically, invisibly, for the time being decisively, into an imperiled...
...time by Washington; he became Washington's de facto chief of staff at the astonishing age of 20. Hamilton was given to nervous collapses, irrational eruptions and an anxious preoccupation with personal glory. It seemed somehow right that such a touchy man should die in a duel. Fortunately, Flexner never permits his psychological theories, which seem sound enough if not pursued to preposterous lengths, to overwhelm this rich and very solid biography, ending with Hamilton's 26th year, two decades before his death...