First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
Thomas E. Ricks
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First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
Thomas E. Ricks
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
First Principles marks a departure for Ricks, a prizewinning journalist, the author of several works on contemporary military and national security affairs and a columnist for The Times Book Review. In this instructive new book, he offers a judicious account of the equivocal inheritance left to modern Americans by their 18th-century forebears.
Fresh from the 2020 presidential election, there probably isn’t a better book to read than Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas E. Ricks’ First Principles. Well informed, gracefully written and brimming with contemporary relevance, regardless of whether your candidate won or lost, it’s a bracing antidote to the presentism that’s one of the worst afflictions of our public life.
... a rich compendium of the ancient wisdom that Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison believed they were gleaning from Aristotle or Tacitus, and the formation of 'classically shaped behavior' in the early republic.
... a delightfully written, fast-paced, and intellectually sophisticated group biography of our first four presidents. Ricks chose a fruitful point of entry into the minds that shaped our nation. Instead of looking at the written work of mature political thinkers struggling to piece together a state during and after the American Revolution, Ricks focuses on the intellectual formation of our first four presidents.
Ricks masterfully documents how examples of city states like Athens and the Roman Republic (before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon) informed the four aforementioned Founding Fathers and their fellow travelers.
Ricks does something quite remarkable: he takes a seemingly academic topic—the Greco-Roman education of the Founding Fathers—and makes it resonate with grand relevance.
... immersive and enlightening.
The author reassures readers that the durable Constitutional order can handle a Donald Trump, and he concludes with 10 strategies for putting the nation back on course. All are admirable, although several—e.g., campaign finance reform, congressional reform, mutual tolerance—regularly fail in practice.