"Books & Brunch" Resumes With Discussion on Andrew Jackson Book

Books & Brunch returns to its regular monthly meetings at noon Saturday, Sept. 20, in the Fourth Estate restaurant to discuss “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House” by Jon Meacham.

The group meets on the third Saturday of each month.

Meacham’s book helps put Washington’s current partisan rancor in context with the story of Jackson’s efforts to shut down the Second National Bank of the U.S. and his battles against southerners who held states had the right to nullify federal laws, such as a tariff that aided northern manufacturers but harmed southern planters.

During Jackson’s two terms at president, he was regularly at odds with Congress. He vetoed 12 bills, more than the total of the six presidents before him.

Meacham's book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. The judges said, "Jackson was the most contradictory of men. The architect of the removal of Indians from their native lands, he was warmly sentimental and risked everything to give more power to ordinary citizens. He was, in short, a lot like his country: alternately kind and vicious, brilliant and blind; and a man who fought a lifelong war to keep the republic safe–no matter what it took."

Alternating between nonfiction and fiction, Books & Brunch will discuss “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy on Saturday, Oct. 18.

Goodreads.com describes the book this way: “Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?”

Those planning to take part in the Oct. 18 discussion also might consider watching "Love and Death," the 1975 Woody Allen satire on Russian literature with Allen and Diane Keaton playing Boris and Sonja, Russians who engage in the kind of philosophical debates writers such as Tolstoy inspire.

For more information or to be added to the Books & Brunch email list, contact chair Jack Williams at [email protected]