Thomas Jefferson: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Everything by Maira Kalman (review)

Kalman launches right in to this attractive picture-book biography with a succinct, spot-on summary of what made Thomas Jefferson memorable: “What was he interested in? Everything. I mean it. Everything.” The ensuing pages support the claim with a litany of his personal enthusiasms, his multitudinous concerns as a statesman, and his mind-boggling legacies, edited and arranged to pique children’s interest even as it covers salient textbook facts. Kalman has reprises some elements of her marvelously innovative picture-book biography Looking at Lincoln (BCCB 2/12), including an accessibly informal tone, a fruit bowl of vibrant colors, a frequent focus on a single telling artifact, and plenty of holes punched through the fourth wall to invite readers into the conversation. However, in this case there is no child guide regaling her peers with her discoveries about a Great Man, and thus the naïve comments and asides that pepper the text are a little more more distracting (“His favorite vegetable was peas. Peas really are wonderful and fun to count”). Still, her candid discussion of Jefferson’s contradictory views on slavery is particularly well handled, and a closing observation gives kids permission to be perplexed by this complicated guy: “If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous, you need to go to Monticello.” Yes, indeed.