Perspective

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times offers no information about author H. W. Brands, and his website offers only bare bones data. Brands holds a bachelor's degree in history and mathematics from Stanford University and taught both subjects at the high school and community college level before concentrating on history. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, he worked as an oral historian and visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, seventeen years at Texas A&M University, and since 2005 has served as the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas. He is the author of twenty books of history and biography, spanning most of the American experience. He has also coauthored or edited five other volumes, and published "dozens of articles and scores of reviews."

The book also offers no motivation for writing about Jackson, but the text suggests...