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YOUNG HICKORY

The Making of Andrew Jackson

Hendrik Booraem

Taylor Trade Publishing
Dallas Texas 2001
212 pages many photos

List $26.95

Amazon.com $18.86
WMSA gets a cut when you buy it from Amazon

Book review
by Kevin L. Jamison, Esq. 

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          The author has created a remarkable book which is minutely researched, and reads with the flow of a novel.  The book presents President Andrew Jackson's first twenty-one years.  The author does so with a remarkably detailed portrait of daily life on the South Carolina frontier in the later 18^th century.

          The author does not fall into the common trap of stressing a single incident or element as stamping the Great Man's character.  He does examine all experiences as shaping his world view.  The work reviews his live in an isolated Irish community on the frontier, service as a partisan in the bloody civil strife on the frontier during the Revolutionary War, and training as a lawyer.

          The author dissects widely disseminated legends for accuracy, and largely lack thereof.  In the same vein he specifically refutes Bellesiles' Arming America.  The author's own research into probate records finds that guns were common on the Carolina frontier.

          The work provides no deep insights into character, military affairs, or political ideology.  He does provide a basis for understanding Andrew Jackson, and the frontier society from which he came.  It will be of inestimable use to historians of the period, and those whose hobby is to recreate that period.

br_young_hickory.htm 12/08/01