THE HEAD AND HEART OF THOMAS JEFFERSON.
By John Dos Passos. (Robert Hale, 25s.) Tuts combination of a distinguished subject and a distinguished writer promises more than in fact it offers. John Dos Passos's technical excellence as a novelist does not transmit well into the field of historical biography and, as a result of a mannerism which he indulges— a mannerism something like his famous `camera eye' technique, by which he offers flat accounts of events and people which impinged on Jefferson's life—whose scope is limited, the book is nothing more than a com- pilation of materials lacking the discrimination and Sophistication that would earn it the name of scholarship. It is impressive enough, fol- lowing out extensive lines of inquiry, present- ing information about the intellectual life of France, England and Scotland, about land exploration in Virginia, about books available, places visited, people known. The perceptions one hoped for into Jefferson's intellectual history are not forthcoming, and since the hook stops short of his presidency, saying nothing of the influence of practical experience and of expediency upon that most critical period of his intellectual history, it does not bring many new valuable illuminations into an ready well-studied field.
MALCOLM BItADBURY
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