Education of Henry Adams

Rating:
Summary: An Education
Review: Henry Adams starts off his autobiography with a description of how tough he's had it living up to the standard of his president great-grandfather, president grandfather, and ambassador to the UK father. Lest the reader who was not born so high-brow as this laugh at the self-absorption that would permit such an upbringing to be conceived of as deprived, Adams then admits that being born with a silver spoon in one's mouth to coincide with such a lineage makes his a minor difficulty compared to the world's real problems. It is this self-awareness and honesty that makes this as excellent a book as it is. Sure, Adams had to live up to a high standard but he also was in a situation where it was possible to do it, and where even failure would be in comfort. Adams' descriptions of his life's longing for education are remarkably honest throughout, and his ability to step outside of the 'holy writ' of entrenched teachings shows that his was a mind that constantly sought answers actually worth their merit. He waxes philosophical (as opposed to autobiographical) at the end, but it is here ("The Virgin and the Dynamo," for example) that he may be at his most profound. Even if you don't agree with his thoughts, he does stimulate consideration of ideas that you may not have previously broached. Lastly, Henry Adams is/was a profoundly arrogant man, although not entirely condescending. I find this refreshing; that he knew his abilities and was comfortable enough in them to not feel the need to fake humility.

Rating:
Summary: A subtle hand on the till
Review: Henry James breathes expansively with a lucid and comfortable narration. A wonderful voice that rings through early manhood, secretary to the ambasador to Great Britan during the American civil war. The ambassador was his father. He provides a tour of his time, the development of his own mind and the influence of others. Intimate and expansive. For me this was a wonderful book. If you enjoy history, good writing and character of voice the Education is the thing.

Rating:
Summary: The greatest non-fiction book?
Review: I was intrigued by this book because it is almost universally considered to be the best non-fiction book ever written. I went into the book with an open mind and eagerness but ultimately found myself a bit disappointed.

Henry Adams was a member of the preeminent American Adams family (John and John Quincy were his great-grandfather and grandfather). Henry's autobiography follows his uniquely privileged life from childhood through old age as Henry witnesses (and always comments on) the ever-changing American experience and perpetually seeks to refine and further his understanding of the world around him. This relentless pursuit of "education" is the connective theme within the autobiography, as Henry continually considers and reconsiders the rapid scientific, technological, economic and political changes that swept through America and the world during his life. Ultimately, through these experiences and reflections, Henry comes to important conclusions about the role of education, learning and life experiences.

This book is filled with historical references and names from Henry's time period, making the book fascinating for someone who is interested in that period (mid 19th to early 20th Centuries). I personally did not find these references interesting and in several cases, I felt confused or lost because I completely missed important references. The strength of the book is Henry's always sharp observation and clever wit.

I think this would be a great book for those interested in Henry's time period or for those interested more broadly in American history. As someone with only peripheral interests in these areas, I found the book to be a little bit out of my league. People interested in this historical period will find this book quite rewarding though don't read it simply because it is supposed to be great-- for that would be an affront to Henry's belief in self-motivated education.

Rating:
Summary: Quite an Education
Review: Mr. Adams wrote a very unique autobiography. This book is written in third person form and tells very little of his personal life and focuses on the events that contributed to his education. There is never any mention of a wife or children in this book but Mr. Adams does give a background of his lineage. Henry Adams has a very readable prose and it is very evident that he is a highly educated individual, quite the contrary to what he wishes the readers to believe. He considers most of his attampts at education a failure in the true Adams self-deprecating style. Truly an enjoyable read from a man of the Nineteenth century with a vision of future advancements.

Rating:
Summary: "Looking blankly into the void of death"
Review: Nearing the age of seventy, when "the mind wakes to find itself looking blankly into the void of death," Adams wrote for his closest friends his version of the earth-shattering events they had experienced. He had 100 copies printed in luxurious editions and, in early 1907, sent them to such dignitaries as Theodore Roosevelt, William and Henry James, Charles Gaskell, and Henry Cabot Lodge. This private account was not released commercially until after Adams's death, in 1918, when it became a best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize.

Many scholars and critics, as well as Adams himself, view "The Education of Henry Adams" as a sequel to his earlier book, "Mont Sant Michel and Chartres" (also privately printed). Indeed, the posthumous edition of the later work opens with an Editor's Preface (signed by Lodge, but presumptuously written by Adams himself) in which the author proposes subtitles for each volume: respectively, "A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity" and "A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity." While the two works are certainly linked thematically, they are not companion works in the traditional sense: "Mont Sant Michel" is a personal examination of medieval institutional and cultural history, while the "Education" is Adams's reckoning of his own involvement in international diplomatic affairs and intellectual circles. In other words, one can safely and profitably read one book without reading the other.

So what is this difficult-to-categorize book about? Reduced to its simplest level, it recounts how an "eighteenth-century American boy" grew up during the nineteenth century, only to be intimidated and awed by the chaos of the twentieth. The unity of earlier ages, when everything revolved around God and Church, had been exploded into limitless possibilities by the discoveries of science and the advent of democracy, and Adams realized that "the child born in 1900 would then be born into a new world which would be not a unity but a multiple."

This somewhat obvious yet essential theme aside, the joy of this book for many readers is Adams's sardonic wit and his penchant for aphorisms; the number of quotable quotes is both delightful and exhausting. A notorious name-dropper, he knows everyone, and offers an insider's account of the most important events of the nineteenth century, volunteering his views on international diplomacy, monetary policy, evolutionary biology, and other matters.

Adams portrays the journey of his life as an ongoing attempt at educating himself, yet he disdainfully learned that formal education was useless and that his dabbling had brought him to a dead end. "Religion, politics, statistics, travel had thus far led to nothing.... Accidental education could go no further, for one's mind was already littered and stuffed beyond hope with the millions of chance images stored away without order in the memory. One might as well try to educate a gravel-pit."

Of course, Adams's self-effacing protests of ignorance are often little more than a pose. His sense of innate blueblood superiority can be grating--a stance exaggerated by his writing about himself in the third person. He repeatedly (and backhandedly) reminds the reader how, as stupid as he might be, he is in good company: "Adams knew only that he would have felt himself on a more equal footing with them had he been less ignorant." "Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the young man seeking education; they knew less than he." "Ridiculous as he knew himself about to be in his new role, he was less ridiculous than his betters." One of the most unintentionally satisfying sections of this book, then, is when Adams finds himself among true aristocrats in England--and they dismiss him as a social inferior.

As even Adams's biographer Ernest Samuels and Adams specialist John Carlos Rowe both acknowledge, the "Education" is an extraordinarily challenging work. Writing for his friends, Adams assumed a familiarity with arcane historical details about such affairs as American-Confederate-British diplomatic machinations during the Civil War, the Gold Scandal of 1869, and John Hay's role in developing China's Open Door Policy. Even the annotations provided by standard commercial editions may not be enough for many readers to flesh out what Adams is talking about.

If there ever was a book that requires a study aid, this is it. Assuming you can overcome the common predisposition against such guides, you will discover that CliffNotes provides, in a useful narrative form, the necessary historical and biographical background--although it is certainly no substitute for the wit and wisdom of the work itself. And, for those who finish reading the book and want to fill in the gaps, the more scholarly "New Essays on The Education of Henry Adams" (edited by Rowe) offers additional valuable insights with a minimum of jargon.

Rating:
Summary: Reflective
Review: Since I like autobiographies and biographies I like this book. He lets you see what a aristocratic (but Chrisitan based) family was like in the days of the establishment of the United States as a country. He talks about travels, influences, and personal reflections.

Since the theme of his book is his personal education, a thought he has on that subject seems appropriate for a review. He writes, "Unless education marches on both feet--theoryand practice--it risks going astray..." That philosophy seems to be consistent throughout the generations. If you like to compare your thoughts with those reflective adventurers of other generations, you'll like this book.

Rating:
Summary: Henry Adams was a fool.
Review: That much is evident from the beginning I started out with
high expectations & was disappointed. I'm glad I listened to the tape rather than try to read it or I would have pitched it early. He was also a bore which explains why he had less of a social life than he wanted & what you'd expect from the grandson of John Quincy Adams. He was neurotic, that being the one of the family traditions he followed. He also had an inferiority complex. For good reason I'd say. For all the advantages he had, the name, a Harvard education, a position as a clerk for his father, in London, during the Civil War & the fact apparently that he didn't have to work very hard... ever, he was basically lazy. History is my avocation. I guess Adams was a historian, & writer. I got nothing from this book & its endless ramblings seem to get worse towards the end. No education.

Rating:
Summary: Development of a conscience
Review: The title of "The Education of Henry Adams" sounds like an autobiography, but the book is really about the development of a man's conscience and theory of human history, using the world events of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a backdrop and a laboratory. Henry Adams -- whose great grandfather was John Adams, the second American President, and whose grandfather obviously was John Quincy Adams, the sixth -- is more than just a presidential legacy; he reveals himself to be a great thinker and writer, the brilliance of his "Education" ensuring him a permanent place in the American canon.

The book has a few attributes that distinguish it from a typical autobiography. The most noticeable is that Adams writes in the third, not first, person. He repeats the word "education" like a mantra throughout the book, referring to it in its literal, not formal, sense: the "bringing up", or development, of a person's mind, manner, and outlook. The narrative is very personal and is not, as some may expect, a rigid historical perspective, although it does offer plenty of commentary on contemporary historical and political events, from the Civil War to two presidential assassinations (Lincoln's and McKinley's, but not Garfield's) to the Industrial Revolution's impact on the American commercial landscape.

Adams writes like a novelist, and this book reads like a novel. His lyrical prose is all the more amazing because it seems like a product of the very education he finds so evasive. Growing up in Quincy, Massachussetts, he hated school; he even confesses that he got little to nothing out of his years at Harvard. Always hopeful to be educated by new experiences, he serves as a secretary to his father, an ambassador, in London during the American Civil War, where he learns about diplomacy from high-ranking British politicians. He proceeds to dabble in various arts and sciences, start a career in journalism, and become an instructor at Harvard, noting the irony of teaching while still searching for his own education.

Throughout the book we get a very vivid picture of Adams as an idiosyncratic mixture of humanism, modesty, shyness, erudition, and a polite sort of cynicism. He has a rather socratic tendency to dismiss all the previous knowledge he has collected as worthless for his continuing education, resolving to start from scratch with a new source. A curious omission in the book is the twenty-year period in which his marriage ends with his wife's suicide; perhaps this event was just too painful to write about, because it's difficult to believe that this experience could not have influenced the pursuit of his education.

If Adams's education can be said to have a culmination, it is in his development of a "dynamic theory of history," in which he compares physical forces (gravity, magnetism) acting on a body to historical forces, produced by the conflict of the sciences ("The Dynamo") against the arts ("The Virgin"), acting on man. With this initiative Adams embodies the nineteenth century American intellectual and political conscience: He proves in this book that he was a greatly informed man, but also that he was wise because he understood the difference between information and wisdom.

Rating:
Summary: Development of a conscience
Review: The title of "The Education of Henry Adams" sounds like an autobiography, but the book is really about the development of a man's conscience and theory of human history, using the world events of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a backdrop and a laboratory. Henry Adams -- whose great grandfather was John Adams, the second American President, and whose grandfather obviously was John Quincy Adams, the sixth -- is more than just a presidential legacy; he reveals himself to be a great thinker and writer, the brilliance of his "Education" ensuring him a permanent place in the American canon.

The book has a few attributes that distinguish it from a typical autobiography. The most noticeable is that Adams writes in the third, not first, person. He repeats the word "education" like a mantra throughout the book, referring to it in its literal, not formal, sense: the "bringing up", or development, of a person's mind, manner, and outlook. The narrative is very personal and is not, as some may expect, a rigid historical perspective, although it does offer plenty of commentary on contemporary historical and political events, from the Civil War to two presidential assassinations (Lincoln's and McKinley's, but not Garfield's) to the Industrial Revolution's impact on the American commercial landscape.

Adams writes like a novelist, and this book reads like a novel. His lyrical prose is all the more amazing because it seems like a product of the very education he finds so evasive. Growing up in Quincy, Massachussetts, he hated school; he even confesses that he got little to nothing out of his years at Harvard. Always hopeful to be educated by new experiences, he serves as a secretary to his father, an ambassador, in London during the American Civil War, where he learns about diplomacy from high-ranking British politicians. He proceeds to dabble in various arts and sciences, start a career in journalism, and become an instructor at Harvard, noting the irony of teaching while still searching for his own education.

Throughout the book we get a very vivid picture of Adams as an idiosyncratic mixture of humanism, modesty, shyness, erudition, and a polite sort of cynicism. He has a rather socratic tendency to dismiss all the previous knowledge he has collected as worthless for his continuing education, resolving to start from scratch with a new source. A curious omission in the book is the twenty-year period in which his marriage ends with his wife's suicide; perhaps this event was just too painful to write about, because it's difficult to believe that this experience could not have influenced the pursuit of his education.

If Adams's education can be said to have a culmination, it is in his development of a "dynamic theory of history," in which he compares physical forces (gravity, magnetism) acting on a body to historical forces, produced by the conflict of the sciences ("The Dynamo") against the arts ("The Virgin"), acting on man. With this initiative Adams embodies the nineteenth century American intellectual and political conscience: He proves in this book that he was a greatly informed man, but also that he was wise because he understood the difference between information and wisdom.

Rating:
Summary: Very tough going, but ultimately worth it
Review: This book ultimately offers a lot, but it takes a lot of work to get there. The writing is very stilted (he refers to himself in the third person), and the perspective is decidedly upper-crusty. Other potentially off-putting aspects of his personality include his negativity, his cold-hearted rationality, and his tendency to find external excuses for his own passivity. The footnotes are also extremely long, although some of them do provide valuable factual background both on the events of the day and on Adams many historical, cultural, artistic, and literary allusions. This is important because his emphasis on the universal in the main text makes some of the historical description quite vague and rushed. Utterly untouched is his personal life, which makes the book in some ways incomplete as an autobiography (which he doesn't intend for it to be, incidentally). He is also prone to overgeneralization ("The Pennsylvania mind is not complex"), although the perspective does produce some pithy phrases("The habit of reticence-talking without meaning-is never effaced", and: "The effect of power and publicity is the aggregation of self.")

Of course, some of these criticisms are also the source of his unique strength. Adams stands in select company in his level of objectivity, and while he is negative about others, he applies the same harsh gaze upon himself. Some reviewers call this false humility. Clearly he knew he was an intelligent person with a unique perspective, but it will be obvious to any reader that he struggled with his self-esteem. Adams is far more introspective than most of the people who's voices are passed down through history, and he is not afraid to ask the big questions. This is the book's greatest asset, and it has provided the book with something close to immortality.

His central challenge at first appears somewhat manageable. He basically wants to travel through time (OK, maybe it's not that manageable); that is, having reached old age, he asks what young people require to become educated. He takes it as a given both that a young person is too inexperienced to know, and that the educational system does not provide the tools. But his definition of education proves to be all-encompassing.

He is such a generalist, and he is so intent on pursuing universal truth, that I found myself at times worrying for his sanity, in much the same manner I felt about Pirsig in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He is at times lost in a kind of anomie, because he refuses to construct false truths that would make his life easier. He will pursue knowledge for its own sake, no matter where it takes him. This proves to be a costly education, in so far as he ends up having little hope in humanity or his own place in the world. He basically feels that most change is directionless (i.e. due to ennui, not true improvement), and that like a pearl with a grain of sand, most people shape their perception of their environment (truth) to suit their needs. He raises the interesting (if controversial, even today) idea that female empowerment (which includes becoming aware of female power) might provide the direction-i.e. morality-missing from men's motion, but feels only time can answer that question. While we could easily write this off as gross overgeneralization today, the fact remains we have barely tested his theory a century later.

He sees some hope out of this conundrum in Bacon's idea of trying to evolve thought from the universe, rather than the other way around. However, he feels the accelerating pace of scientific discovery and technological innovation will ultimately destroy our entire sense of reality by shattering those illusions which make life liveable for us. He also raises the possibility that acceleration will lead more directly to our corporeal destruction.

Adams closes the book with the wistful hope that by 1938 (ironically enough) we might live in a world that "sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder." Sadly, one senses that this is one of the few times this realist allowed himself to hope. Even in that moment though, we sense that he does not really believe the future will be brighter.

In the last book I read, Life of Pi, one is encouraged to choose a belief, perhaps unreal, that might lead to a better reality in the future. Here we meet someone who has attempted to pursue truth, even if it ends up leaving him unhappy in an unhappy world, with little to believe in. Perhaps Pi's choice is the easy way out. It is certainly the easier book to read and is more popular today; but will it survive as Adams' book has? Time will tell.