Rarely does a work of history combine grace of writing with such broad authority.

 

Jon Kukla is a master storyteller, and the compelling narrative of the Louisiana Purchase is worthy of his talents. Four countries, four centuries, a dozen intrigues, and one fascinating tale of nation-building.

- Joyce Appleby, author of Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans

 

 

A splendid, beautifully written narrative focused tightly on the complex historic origins of the Purchase and on the diplomacy that pulled it off. Necessarily, his tale takes in the whole world, including the aspirations of Napoleon’s failed forays into the Western Hemisphere and his resulting need for cash. But Kukla stays firmly on this side of the Atlantic. Jefferson takes center stage, but his Federalist opponents, whose sometimes disunionist machinations kept matters complex, are in the wings. Kukla's portraits of the principal diplomats – Robert Livingston and James Monroe on the American side; Talleyrand, François de Barbé-Marbois and Napoleon on the French – deftly illuminate the crucial mix of personality, circumstance and skill that made the United States a continental nation so early in its existence. . . . Rarely does a work of history combine grace of writing with such broad authority.

- Publisher’s Weekly

 

 

An epic story, ranging from the capitals of Europe to the Haitian revolution to the Mississippi Valley. Diplomacy and war, duplicity and bribery, ambition and continental vision – Kukla’s fast-paced narrative has it all. The Louisiana Purchase was the climax of a fascinating series of events. In this book they come together as never before.

- Charles Royster, author of The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company

 

 

Surely as exciting and readable a narrative of the Louisiana Purchase as we are likely to get in the foreseeable future. Kukla's book is good old-fashioned history-storytelling in the Henry Adams tradition. . . . Kukla begins his story in the 1780s with Spain's initial efforts to control the Mississippi outlet to the Gulf of Mexico, and he concludes it with the transcontinental treaty between Spain and the United States in 1819 that gave East and West Florida to the United States and set the northern and southern boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase. In between Kukla presents a remarkable story rich in entertaining anecdotes, colorful characters, and unpredictable contingencies, a story so remarkable and so apparently contingency-ridden that its outcome seems almost as unpredictable and thus as providential as we Americans later came to believe it was.

- The New Republic

 

 

A wonderful story, wonderfully told. The richness of detail and freshness of insight combined with the power of its narrative flow should make the book a winner for the historian and general reader alike.

- W. W. Abbot, editor emeritus of The Papers of George Washington

 

 

In A Wilderness So Immense, Jon Kukla presents a wonderfully rich, often riveting overview of the national and international intrigues that occurred over a twenty-year period with regard to the gaining by the new United States of access to the Mississippi River and the rich lands abutting it. After all, the Purchase ultimately involved not only the United States and France, from whom it was acquired, but also Spain and, of course, the country we defeated in our own Revolution, Great Britain.
The cast of characters includes such American icons as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, but in many ways the book is “stolen” by a fascinating array of European diplomats much less likely to be familiar to all but dedicated scholars of the period. . . . One sometimes feels that Kukla’s book could have been edited more tightly. But if such editing had come at the price of his truly fascinating asides and portraits, it would not have been worth it, for it is both a marvelous read and wonderfully informative.

- History Book Club

 

 

Some readers might wish that A Wilderness So Immense contained more discussion of the Native Americans whose ancestral lands Jefferson, Carlos IV and Napoleon cavalierly claimed and negotiated away, but that omission does not markedly diminish Kukla's overall achievement. His splendid account of almost four decades of Spanish rule in New Orleans is arguably the best narrative yet written about that period (an era often overlooked in a city that emphasizes its Franco-American heritage). And his ability to interweave evocative anecdotes, biography and colorful asides with the complex diplomatic, military and political events that led up to the Louisiana Purchase makes A Wilderness So Immense fresh, stylish, and compelling.

- The New Orleans Times-Picayune

 

 

Kukla has done his homework. His account is thoroughly researched and skillfully written, and he effectively places the Purchase in a wider, global context. Kukla shows us why and how the Purchase happened and explains its importance to America's future.

- The Denver Post