About the Author

Richard Brookhiser is the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington and The Way of the WASP. He has also edited and annotated Washington's Rules of Civility. He is a Senior Editor at National Review and a New York Observer columnist. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

James Grant The Wall Street Journal [A] wonderful portrait....Mr. Brookhiser has put his own intelligent stamp on the life of a great man.

Brookhiser (Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington) rediscovers another founding father. Hamilton was one of the epochal figures of the Revolutionary period‘he collaborated with Madison on the Federalist papers, served as secretary of the treasury under Washington and, along with Jefferson, is largely responsible for the modern two-party system‘but he was also one of the most controversial. John Adams called Hamilton a "bastard" and a "foreigner" (both charges held some degree of truth); Jefferson thought he was secretly "against the liberty of the country," an accusation Brookhiser emphatically disproves. Hamilton's death only increased his infamy; he fell in a duel with then Vice President Aaron Burr, an event that remains one of the most bizarre in American history. ("Imagine Al Gore shooting Donald Regan," Brookhiser writes.) In this slim but rewarding book, Brookhiser traces the entire course of Hamilton's professional and personal life. Though he doesn't shrink from the more unsavory episodes, such as Hamilton's adulterous affair with a married woman and her subsequent blackmail of him, the author clearly admires his subject. The only blemish is Brookhiser's occasional use of bubblegum psychology, as when he writes of Hamilton's desire to "be his father" as a driving force behind Hamilton's infidelity. Although he doesn't provide a substantive analysis of Hamilton's work (just four pages are given to the Federalist papers, arguably the most important contribution of Hamilton's career), Brookhiser gives us a valuable, incisive portrait both of Hamilton's character and of the character of young America. (Mar.)

Gary H. Rawlins USA Today A pithy and entertaining biography....In this bold reinterpretive study that throws down the gauntlet to Jefferson's disciples, Brookhiser ably pleads Hamilton's case before the bar of history....The author's achievement is to capture the full nature of a great but flawed man.
James Grant The Wall Street Journal [A] wonderful portrait....Mr. Brookhiser has put his own intelligent stamp on the life of a great man.
Michael R. Beschloss The New York Times Book Review A dramatic, compact biography that fairly gallops through Hamilton's picaresque life. Alexander Hamilton, American brilliantly succeeds in arguing that Hamilton deserves greater credit than he usually gets for his brainpower, idealism, and vision.
Orlando Patterson National Review Richard Brookhiser's splendid biography...succeeds in doing what no other work has quite done before: provide a portrait of Hamilton that brings out the true genius of the man in a volume that is both elegantly written and accessible to a mass audience.