Diaries make for compelling reading. They offer an intimate glimpse into real lives and also help map the contours of life in the past  its customs, concerns, manners and events. Revolutionary America's most intriguing diarist was Virginian Landon Carter, and a new book by historian Rhys Isaac titled "Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom" explores the fascinating journals that Carter kept between 1752 and his death in 1778.

Born in 1710, Carter grew up in one of Virginia's leading families. His father, Robert "King" Carter, was among the wealthiest and most influential merchant planters in Colonial America. In 1719, at age 9, Landon went to England for seven years of formal schooling. In 1727 he returned to the Chesapeake to assist his aging  and now widowed  father. Five years later, upon the death of "King" Carter, Landon inherited several Tidewater plantations covering tens of thousands of acres and eventually worked by some 400 slaves.

Landon Carter lived at Sabine Hall, a magisterial estate perched on a ridge along the Rappahannock River in Richmond County, about 60 miles north of Williamsburg. He quickly emerged as one of the region's civic and social leaders. He served as justice of the peace, militia colonel and parish vestryman. In 1752, he began 18 years of service in Virginia's House of Burgesses.

Carter's three wives all died young, having borne eight children. In 1756, the triple widower convinced his eldest son, Robert Wormeley Carter, to bring his new bride, Winifred Beale, to live at Sabine Hall. Son and daughter- in-law helped Carter manage the social responsibilities of his high station, yet they also proved to be vexing companions. Carter came to despise his "devilish" daughter-in-law. "I see in her," he declared, "the cause of all the ill treatment my son has given me ever since his marriage."

Landon Carter was a character of Shakespearean complexity and proportion: powerful, vulnerable, vain and enmeshed in familial distrust and disappointment. He used his diary as a catalyst for reflection, as a therapeutic release for his overflowing emotions and as a historical record. He also used it as a tool for expressing frustrations with his family members, deliberately making it accessible for their furtive readings.

A richly learned man, Carter was well-read and curious. He took great pride in his knowledge of agricultural science and his genius for entrepreneurial enterprise. He also fancied himself an expert on medicine and eagerly attended to the fevers and agues befalling his family and slaves. Like many planters, Carter considered slavery a necessary evil and viewed himself as a "very kind" master. Yet his diary entries reveal a man willing to intimidate and whip slaves caught stealing or deemed indolent or careless.

By the 1760s, as tensions between the American Colonies and Great Britain boiled over, Carter found himself beset with rebellions within his own plantation empire. His diary entries became more impassioned and blustery. They reflect the feelings of a brittle patriarch, filled with preening pride and grumpy self-pity, determined to rule at home yet desperate for affection and devotion. His unruly family provoked constant friction and disappointment. Carter's children, he came to believe, were eagerly awaiting his death and their inheritances. They defied him with theatrical flair and mulish regularity. His daughter eloped with a man he had forbidden her to see; his "obstinate" son Robert grew addicted to gambling; his grandson Landon was surly and insolent. Carter turned to his diary to vent his emotions, nurse his wounds and nourish his grudges.

Growing rebelliousness in the British Colonies during the 1770s accompanied spreading rebellions in Carter's domestic kingdom. In 1776, for instance, eight slaves stole a gun, "took my grandson Landon's Bag of bullets and all the Powder, and went off in my Petty Auger canoe" to join up with royal governor Lord Dunmore, who promised runaway slaves their freedom if they would join the British.

Like many American planters, Carter was an ambivalent revolutionary. By habit and conviction, he preferred maintaining ties with the British, but he eventually concluded that there was no choice but to pursue independence from a distant government grown tyrannical. Isaac highlights the irony of Carter, the "righteous patriarch," grudgingly endorsing defiance of the king's rule at the same time that he was lamenting the loss of paternalistic authority within his own plantation world. The "king" of Sabine Hall came to loathe his revolting son, Robert. In 1776, he recorded in his diary that his "cursed" son was "my most vexatious tyrant, & everybody seems to take pleasure that he is so."

"Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom" provides a captivating view of a leading planter's personal life and political transformation during the Revolutionary era. Isaac deftly blends pungent extracts from Carter's diary with illuminating biographical details and historical commentary. The result is a splendid addition to our understanding of the Virginia gentry  and of ourselves.