With a novelist's skill and a scholar's meticulous detail, Fawn M. Brodie portrays Thomas Jefferson as he wrestled with issues of revolution, religion, power, race, and love-ambivalences that exerted a subtle but powerful influence on his political writing and his decision making. Brodie's biography was the first to set forth a convincing case that Thomas Jefferson was the father of children born to his slave Sally Hemings, a case that has now been confirmed by DNA tests of their descendants. Softbound, 594 pages.