Just finish it and found it thoroughly enjoyable.I started reading presidential biographies in the '50s in grade school and discovered Brookhiser's works much later. I found this treatment of 'wisdom of the past used to address modern questions' very fascinating and I recommend it to all American history buffs.

I love history, and learned a lot about our Founders from reading this book.
It was interesting to see today's questions and what the Founders might say about them.
Made me think.

Good book and well written.

Very interesting.

What WOULD the founders do at the polls? Or on any other issue that concerns our congressional body: immigration, fund raising, pork barrels, earmarks, and all the rest. I think a copy of this book ought to be made a permanent fixture in the Oval Office, as well as each and every Congressman's office.

Activists, you might want to read this thing as well--it might teach you how to use your representation more effectively.

Often when one turns on the television to any political talk show, regardless of the station, it is not unusual to find someone on program invoking men from centuries past. The person will claim that founders of the United States would support position A (their position) and be against position B (their opponent's position). Often the person will even argue that their opponent's position is an outright betrayal of the founders' vision. These `talking heads*' often make quite a few assumptions with their statements. The biggest and most popular of these assumptions is that all the founders thought the same way. They did not, there were several founders and they all thought differently about different things. Therefore, for every idea you have, you probably could find a founder who would support that particular idea.

I have always wondered when people ask what Jefferson, Washington, or any other founder would want: do they consider biographical time lines? For example, if someone asks what Thomas Jefferson would feel about Obama's health care plan, I always wonder which Tom Jefferson the person asking means.

· Is this person referring to the Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776?

· Is the person referring to President Thomas Jefferson in 1805?

· Is the person thinking of Jefferson as if he woke up from his really long nap he started on July 4th, 1826, and the first thing he does now that he has woken up is to pick up a newspaper and read about the new health care law?

That last one is important to me. After all, a great leader is not someone who believes in the same thing on Wednesday that he or she believed on Monday regardless what happened on Tuesday. I have often thought, through my own study of the Founding Fathers that, if given all the information, they would quite pleased with the country's progress.

However, in his book, Brookhiser creates and interesting way of tying modern events to the founding era. He takes questions that modern Americans have and uses it to provide history lessons into how the founders handled similar situations in their time-period. One of the questions posed was: `were the founders were as poll driven as the politicians of today?'

"No one in the founding era was interrupted at dinner by some stranger asking his opinion of current events. Yet public opinion could be gauged, by demonstrations, by memorials---letters to politicians from citizen groups---and by newspapers. (Some founders thought measuring public opinion was all a newspaper was good for: `Like a thermometer,' wrote Fisher Ames, `it will show what the weather is, but will not make it better') The founding fathers disagreed, however, about how public opinion should be expressed, and what weight to give it." p. 198-9

He then goes on to explain that George Washington hated lobbyists** and thought they were constitutional usurpers, while James Madison both liked and used them.

What Would the Founders Do?, is a fun book and great teaching tool. Those who read this book it will enjoy the fun in comparing the world of the founders to our own.

* "Talking heads" is an old phrase for news anchors and others who appear on T.V. news programs. It has nothing to do with the old rock band.

**To use a modern term.

This book came as a gift last Christmas. At first it didn't look like it was going to have much to offer - a short and simple book from yet another writer trying to retroactively impose the views and opinions of the Founders on today's issues and events. But, it was a gift, and so it was thrown onto the "books to read" stack where it figured to be short work before getting relegated to the miscellaneous section of the history shelf on the bookcase. It did not take too many pages to realize that first impressions, in this instance, were quite wrong. This book has a good deal to say and it does so consistently and efficiently from beginning to end. In good, clean form it takes a single idea and looks at it from a different angle in each chapter. The end result is a book that is thorough, to the point, and enjoyable to read.

While the title indicates that this is simply a book about how the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and the rest of the founding bunch would deal with today's issues, there is something more to be had from this book. And that something is an important point which has been frequently lost on recent generations of Americans. It's almost assumed at this point to speak about the American Founders as though they were a unified body in both action and thought. Before considering how "the founders" might deal with our issues, and when considering how they actually dealt with their issues, it needs to be understood, first and foremost, that as a whole they never really agreed all that much with each other about anything, other then the fact they wanted to be rid of English rule - and even with that there was some squabbling.

The reason that this point is one of importance is that when we hear of the Founders today, and we do quite a bit from quite a few, it always seems to be from someone representing a particular interest group (a politician, an educator, a journalist, or some other hack-intellectual) who is speaking to us about the founders as if they were pinning their name onto their lapels suggesting that "the founders" as a whole, would support us. This is almost never the case. And this is a book, whether or not by design, that does a superb job of speaking to that point.

This is a worthwhile read for fans of history, or fans of reading period. And, as it did for me, it will make an excellent gift. Recommended to anybody - 5 stars.