Burr
At the end of his life Aaron Burr dictates his biography from the Revolutionary War to his treason trial.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
8mentions
3people
2012–2024years
75% recommend13% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think they are just about middling historical fiction, compared to War and Peace or even Ivanhoe or Gore Vidal's novels about American History like Burr.
- Isn't Chernow a bit too referential towards his subject?
Gore Vidal for example has much more cynical view of George Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
I recommend Gore Vidal's "Burr", an account a lot of the early days of the US with Burr as the focal point.
"Burr (1973) portrays the eponymous anti-hero as a fascinating and honorable gentleman, and portrays his contemporary opponents as mortal men; thus, George Washington is an incompetent military officer, a general who lost most of his battles; Thomas Jefferson is a fey, especially dark and pedantic hypocrite who schemed and bribed witnesses in support of a false charge of treason against Burr, to whom he almost lost the presidency in the 1800 United States presidential election; and Alexander Hamilton is an over-ambitious opportunist whose rise in high politics was by General Washington's hand." -- from Wikipedia
- There is entertaining novel by Gore Vidal on his life, titled "Burr".
- This is exactly the opposite of how I feel about hamilton. And lin-manuel miranda in general. As much as hip-hop is fundamentally a "telling" art form, I feel like Miranda's text is far far on the "show don't tell" spectrum in terms of it's emotional content, say, compared to 90s west coast hip hop. (See also moana, the lyrics in that are very tell-not-show). For a more intelligent fictionalisation of that era, I recommend Burr, by Gore Vidal.
- I think the golden age of historical fiction is long past, of works like:
-Walter Scott's Ivanhoe
-George Eliot's Romola
-Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis
-Bulwer Lytton's Last days of Pompeii
-Evelyn Waugh's Helena
-Anatole France's God's are athirst.
-Tolstoy's War and Peace
-Gore Vidal's Burr and also some of the others.
- Shogun is a great read. It got me started on the whole historical fiction genre. The rest of the books in Clavell's Asian Saga are pretty good too except for maybe Gai-jin. I also enjoyed reading Gore Vidal's Lincoln and Burr from his Narratives of the Empire series - very entertaining and definitely not run-of-the-mill biographic portrayals.
