CHRISTMAS AT MONTICELLO

Another in this presidential panel recreates a historical background for the personality of its central figure -- here Thomas Jefferson in the year 1809 when, retired from public life, he returns home to learn to live with himself. But Monticello becomes a sightseers' paradise during the summer, he is hounded by a bad debt, and haunted by the sad company of ghosts, particularly that of his wife, Martha, for whom he had so little time in his enormous efforts to help a new nation be born. It is not until the coming of Christmas that he answers the old question of being an infidel by attending church on Christmas Eve. A gentle telling, this keeps to the mood of the previous books in the series.