Education of Henry Adams

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Summary: SEVENTY YEARS IN THE HISTORY OF A MIND!!!
Review: This is an amazing document that chronicles seventy years in the history of a mind. Since the mind chronicled is that of Henry Adams (who is the son of congressman/diplomat Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, and the great grandson of President John Adams) it is of more historical value than most other biographical memoirs. The elucidation and harsh criticism that Adams lauds upon himself and the chaos of the world during the 19th and early 20th centuries is at once acute, biting, satiric, and warm with a fervent desire to see this country come of age in the new era of modern technological advances. Even though the subtitle of the book is "An Autobiography" Adams doesn't strive to tell the story of his life, but instead tells us the story of the development of his mental processes and of his ultimate conclusions after a lifetime of political, philosophical, and historical contemplation. As a result of this rigid excise of narrative the reader loses out on some of the man's more personal and intimate moments including the controversial absence of twenty years in which his marriage to photographer Clover Adams, her subsequent death by suicide (she poisoned herself with potassium cyanide), and the writing of his massive ten volume "History Of The United States" are completely omitted (although there are some references to the latter work in the text). But "The Education" as a whole is not hurt by this absence, and the twin chapters "Darwinism" and "The Dynamo And The Virgin" foretell a haunting future in which the unity of force as established by the Church, Christianity, and the majesty of the Virgin Mary is uprooted by Darwin's theory of evolution and the "power" of technology as represented by the energy dynamos Adams witnessed at the Paris exposition of 1900. After seeing the emergence of such technology and the chaos Darwinism caused he felt that the power of force as encapsulated by the Church had been thrown into such a chaos that it could never be righted again until a new man for a new age was capable of harnessing the forces of technology and forging a new future that would repair the damage done by the dislodging of Chruch and Christianity into the fiery sea of scientific philosophy and discovery. Although the pessimism of science without religion, and the disadvantage of religion without science is a fracture that must be remedied if both studies are to help explain the reality of our existence and give us hope in facing the nuclear/biological terrorism of the 21st century in which religion alone can't stop a bomb from being deflected and destroyed, and science alone can't provide an answer to the wickedness of a human heart hell-bent for power, greed, selfish gain, hedonistic pleasure, and rampant violence against all humanity. Adams' "theory of acceleration" is a bit difficult to understand, but boils down to a figure of numbers in which the advances in technology result in an acceleration of process and modification and availability of that technology until the latest research comes along to take us away on a voyage of new discovery (i.e. the development of computers which continued on a small scale, then were refined and marketed to the whole of society, then refined and made less expensive so that every household could afford to own one, and which is now being refined once again by the internet). This simultaneous looking forward and looking back is what makes "The Education" such a prophetic and groundbreaking work, and the reason for its ranking as the number one book of the 20th century by the Modern Library.

Rating:
Summary: The cold classic of an unlikeable genius
Review: This is one of the great American books. The scion of one of America's most patrician families tells the story of his education. And his education is the story of his disillusionment with the time and world he comes to live in, and his idealization of a long lost medieval world. The Virgin of the medieval Catholic vision which represents for Adams an organic harmony is opposed and contradicted by the Dynamo of his own world. And that Dynamo is of scientific and technological progress accelerating at such an intense pace that the sense of the world, the center falls apart . And the Adams born to the heart of America's founding elite feels himself increasingly not at home in the world. The majestic tone, the third person narrative, the whole detached way he tells his own story prevents the reader from the most intense kind of sympathy with him. And yet his vision of a world somehow come apart in going too far and too fast in directions we do not understand does speak to us today.
There are of course other aspects of the richness of the work, including the insight into the political worlds of the Washington of his time.
But there is too a sense of an elite observer for whom the America of successive waves of immigration is not the real America . And there is a sense of Miniver Cheevy child of scorn cursing the day that he was born, of that is the ' old- line aristrocat ' who feel these new and other Americans have stolen his home and place from him.
This is a work which much can be learned , and which certainly has much to be admired in it intellectually. But it is not a work nor is it written by a person , that warms the heart, moves and inspires.