Welcome to Litsy!

⭐️⭐️Every year, for the last 4 years, I listen to a presidential biography. They are generally harder works for me to get through, but this one proved almost impossible.
A lot comes down to the audio narrator who honestly sounds like a computer reading the book - so much so that I at first looked it up to make sure it was actually a human. And for THIRTY EIGHT HOURS, that‘s a lot. This book did too much & with a very difficult narrator.

This is a humorous foreshadowing when you consider that Jefferson and Hamilton were archenemies in Washington's first term. Madison, who co-wrote most of the Federalist Papers with Hamilton, will end up siding with Jefferson.

The original gerrymander - used in the very first elections by one of the famous patriots against the guy that wrote the Constitution. Patrick Henry was very much against the new Constitution and kind of bitter at Madison for out-arguing him in convincing Virginia to adopt it.

Minerva cat.

Lol Madison thought Ben Franklin was a British spy.

Reading this took me ages and was a real project, but worth it in the end. Highly recommended if you're a history buff, like a LOT of detail, and don't mind some textbook-like dryness. Given Madison's long life of public service in years that saw creation of the Constitution, the War of 1812, and him working closely with four other presidents, a one-volume biography HAD to be long to do him justice.

"Madison's experience in finding that religious diversity confounded those inclined to seek privilege or to oppose dissent, helped importantly in forming his more general theory that freedom was safest in the presence of a multitude of counterbalancing forces, which acted to check the tyrannical impulses of any one of them". -Still so true more than 200 years later.