THE SUBTITLE OF Jon Meacham’s massive new life of Thomas Jefferson promises a probing exploration of how-he-did-it—the ways and means of power politics. Since Jefferson is generally perceived more as a philosopher-king than a Tammany pol, such an examination, coming from a highly regarded biographer and political commentator, should yield fresh insights into the Sphinx. But Meacham has chosen storytelling over analysis, offering up a genial but meandering narrative. There is some meat in the book, but finding it requires dexterity and doggedness—checking the endnotes after every ten pages or so to see what is missing from the passing panorama. Meacham has read the scholarly literature on Jefferson—some of it critical—but doesn’t let enough of this debate intrude on the storytelling, which nearly always puts Jefferson in the best possible light.

Early in the book, Meacham shows that he has fallen under the Jeffersonian spell. Perhaps having George Washington’s formative, rough-and-tumble early years in mind, Meacham seeks to give Jefferson some backwoods cred and tells a story of a hunt that was set down by Jefferson’s grandson: “Jefferson learned the importance of endurance and improvisation early, and he learned it the way his father wanted him to: through action, not theory.” To toughen ten-year-old Tom, his father sent him into the woods, “alone, with a gun,” Meacham writes. “The assignment—the expectation—was that he was to come home with evidence that he could survive on his own in the wild.” The little deerstalker doesn’t do well, but “he soldiered on until his luck finally changed.” And here the episode slides into farce. Young Jefferson finds a wild turkey already caught in a trap—“he tied it with his garter to a tree, shot it, and carried it home in triumph.” Not exactly the infant Hercules strangling the serpents, but it will do as a test that “foreshadowed much in Jefferson’s life” and illuminates his character: “When stymied, he learned to press forward. Presented with an unexpected opening, he figured out how to take full advantage.”

Savoring victory over a trapped animal does not speak well of a future president; and a reader cannot have much confidence in a biographer who is blind to the ridiculousness of this episode. Similarly, Meacham has a hard time seeing the ugliness in Jefferson’s unsavory (to say the least) sexual advances to Elizabeth Walker, the wife of a close friend. Conceding the obvious, that “it would have been adultery,” Meacham nonetheless offers a rather positive gloss on Jefferson’s attempts to force himself on Mrs. Walker: “Attractive and virile, a powerful and charismatic man, he wanted what he wanted, and he did not give up easily.” In this telling, lechery sounds like just another political campaign.

When the Revolution erupts, Meacham hits his stride, painting a vivid picture of the confusion in the Continental Congress over war policy and the composition of the Declaration of Independence. Meacham gives a clear-eyed account of Jefferson’s inglorious performance as Virginia’s wartime governor, though he cannot resist sprinkling Jefferson with a bit of second-hand martial glory: “To live among those who are following the news of bloodshed in their homes, who have a direct stake in the outcome, is to experience conflict at a more fundamental level.”

But at times Meacham simply hands the book over to Jefferson, allowing the narrative to devolve into a pastiche of quotations from Jefferson’s papers, stitched together chronologically, with Meacham interposing only light, talk-show-level commentary. This is understandable; with so much seductive Jeffersonian prose to quote, Jefferson’s biographers run the risk of becoming little Jeffersons, making his perspective theirs. The problem, as Joanne B. Freeman has pointed out in her reading of Jefferson’s political memoirs, is that Jefferson did not shrink from depicting his “personal perspective as objective history.”