JEFFERSON’S GREAT GAMBLE

Born of military bullying and diplomatic haggling, the massive real-estate deal known as Louisiana Purchase makes a remarkable story indeed—but one that this slight volume does little justice.

The broad outlines: France, in control of Spain and with world-imperial ambitions at the beginning of the 19th century, is never happier than when it’s thwarting England’s movements around the world. The nascent US, having little love for the British Empire as well, has ambitions of its own to expand across the continent. Though not particularly fond of Americans, Napoleon decides to fatten his coffers and tick off the English by selling Spain’s North American holdings to Jefferson’s government. Voilà, the Louisiana Purchase, a barely legal transaction that “must have convinced many . . . that nature’s design for the planet included a special role for America.” Cerami, an economist and historian, gets the main points right, and he extends the story in some useful ways, particularly by charting how the deal made its way through a divided American legislature. But even the best parts of the narrative are better told elsewhere, and Cerami writes with the rhetorical flourishes befitting a Cold War–era intermediate-school textbook: Of Jefferson, for instance, he exults, “No ‘brutal frontiersman’ was more committed to the idea of expanding to the west than this son of Virginia was,” while of the contending European colonial powers he writes, against a generation of more sophisticated historians, that “only the British colonists looked at the land and saw all the ways that hard-working people . . . could earn more ‘gold’ in the American wilderness than the Old World had ever offered”—as if hard work were alien to the Spanish, French, and Dutch.

Anachronistic, incomplete—and insignificant next to such powerful studies as Roger G. Kennedy’s upcoming Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause (Mar. 2003).