John Adams

Rating:
Summary: John Adams on Prozac
Review: This book was a disapointment for me. McCullough takes too much of the edge off John Adams, dulling him almost beyond recognition. A person can be a crank and a great man but the author has toned him down too much. Where is the ex-president cursing his enemies as he worked his farm. John Ferling and Joseph Ellis presented much more engaging and human portrayals of Adams in their biographies. I give McCullough points for capturing the feel of the 18th-19th century brilliantly, the sights, attitudes and vast distances. He does a good job on Adams' later years. But JA was a man of very strong opinions and major flaws, he was also a genius, a great patriot and a very good president (Wilson and Nixon talked about peace, JA achieved it). He is done a disservice by glossing over his very human personality.

Rating:
Summary: Good biography from the Plymouth Rock School
Review: Plus: As much about Abigail as John.

Minus: Why does Adams/good always seem to degenerate into Jefferson/bad? Can't we like them both?

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: Mr. McCullough has done it again! Keeping with the tradition of Truman, this book is researched very carefully. I was able to get a copy at BEA in Chicago (signed too :). McCullough is a grateful author who truely provides historians a great tool to look at Adams life. If you are at all interested in the Revolutionary period I recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and insightful book
Review: It amazes me to think what great things we humans are capable of achieving when facing the greatest of odds against us. This intimate look at the man who was John Adams is so much more than a story of Revolution or Presidency. It is a look at life from its heartbreaks, depressions, risks and exultations. The people of the late 18th and early 19th centuries knew what all of these life issues were. They were inescapable. The Story of John Adams is how one man conquered what life dealt him through fierce dedication to his beliefs and a resolute confidence in his family, especially his wife, to sustain him through whatever trial he faced. This story of John Adams is a superbly researched text which has been liberally and accurately infused with genuine feeling which is the trademark of its author. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the time period of the piece but also wishes an insight into human nautre that few can express as Mr. Adams did and Mr. McCullogh does.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, compelling history
Review: I found John Adams by Mr. McCoullough to be on a par with another founding father biography on Ben Franklin by H.W. Brands. John Adams is a beautifully written book, lyrical in quality. Both biographies capture the human being in both. What we forget is that these men had families, needed income, and faced everyday problems such as disease and the elements. Mr. McCoullough's portrait of the everyday life of John Adams is fascinating.

I clearly gained much more respect for John Adams after reading this book than I have from other portrayals. Given the manufactured images of today's politicians we forget that true statesmen of principle once dominated politics. John Adams was a plain spoken honest patriot, as were most of our founding fathers. But we must also appreciate their personal sacrifices such as months away from family,personal risk in the war and loss of income while doing government service. They never got $100,000 a speech or commercial endorsements after their service.

I strongly urge a reading of both recent biographies of Ben Franklin and John Adams. You will have a much better appreciation of these men than the superficial treatments received in history class.

Rating:
Summary: Rapidly begins to fill the gaps
Review: Among the many prodigious gaps in my knowledge base, perhaps none stands more imposing than my relative ignorance about the Revolutionary War and the resulting growing pains and discoveries made by our nation in its infancy.

Enter David McCullough who, as he did with the excellent previous works on Truman and Roosevelt, manages to paint history as a breathing organism worthy of epic storytelling.

The John Adams as presented here is a man worthy of solid reconsideration as critical to our birth as the superstars that were Washington and Jefferson. McCullough posseses an uncanny knack at making elevated political figures human in all the right sense. John Adams comes off as being that rarest of human animals, (sadly at least in the contemporary mind) an American political figure who truly is a renaissance man. It is all too easy to forget and trivilize the extreme high stakes Adams and the other founding fathers were playing for.

In reading McCullough's latest book, I do not get the full sense of sweeping tapestry as I did with his other works. There is much in the book that appears to be missing. McCullough does however include a most helpful bibliography in his research that inspires me to search further into the era.

And perhaps that is McCullough's greatest contribution. Like the other great pop historian, Stephen Ambrose, McCullough inspires the reader to continue on beyond his immediate material and celebrate history through personal investigation. "John Adams" for the beginner (in this case me), serves as a most effective starting point for a journey into the invention of a nation. Keep up the excellent work Mr. McCullough.

Rating:
Summary: THE PRESIDENCY SURVIVES
Review: IIII believe as a Rhodesd scholar and a Fulbright winmner that this a a GEM , I do not know if those who relish these absolutely erudite boooks can handle mysteries but I hope so As I just finished the first of a 14 part series about a shrink written by a shrink who is terrified of all yet specializes in violent patients and his fab wife Millie. He gets by with identifiying with Wagners THE RING. Hence this round about connecti0n with

 wh0o used all available to harbor needed courage ans bravery. The book is titlesa FATAL BETRAYAL by ?ruce Forester And is fast paced and immensely literate..

Rating:
Summary: The popular Adams...
Review: ...and by that I mean popular biography. This book, "JOHN ADAMS by David McCullough, strange as it may sound, is a good general introduction to our 2nd president. Strange because as one of the founding fathers of the nation, we are supposedly well schooled in his life story; it also seems inappropriate to use the word introduction when talking about someone who played such a pivotal role in one of history's great revolutions. But an introduction it is and I think that is exactly what Mr McCullough intended. For two reasons:

(1) The focus on Adams in previous books has been mostly on his intellectual prowess, portraying him correctly as the thoughtful, political philosopher that he was. This emphasis has however tended to fix Adams in our minds as blunt, irascible, and inflexible. This is best shown in his dealings with America's opponents (The British and French). While McCullough shows these sides of the man, he brings them out in the context of Adams' extreme s!ense of duty, his patriotism and his almost frenetic approach to work. Adams had parliamentary experience with the Continental Congresses, functioned in diplomatic postings to Holland and France during the revolutionary war and subsequently served as minister to the Court of St James (the first US ambassador to Great Britain). McCullough therefore in highlighting these aspects of Adams' career - consummate negotiator and diplomat - shows how narrow and misleading it is to view Adams primarily as abrasive, argumentative and intransigent.

(2) With John Adams frankness was equally at ease with warmness and witticisms, and this is ably shown by the book's frequent use of letters that Adams and his wife Abigail wrote to each other. We are familiar with the man's political writings and we also knew that Abigail was a wise woman, but the selection and use of their letters here adds a rich humanity to this relationship which is one of the real strengths of this biography, and !perhaps is the real reason why it will indeed be referred to as a popular biography.

Rating:
Summary: McCullough's kindlier-gentler Adams
Review: Although it is not his best book, McCullough largely (not to say "hugely," a sloppy modifier for which he has a repetitive weakness) delivers on the high expectations for his thick biography of the Braintree Sage. His research is good and he has skillfully employed the two best aspects of John Adams' life in his account: Adams' own voluminous, revealing writings and his marriage to the irresistible Abigail. His accounts of Adams' finest hours--the creation of the Declaration of Independence and his refusal to declare war against France in 1798--are dramatically structured and emotionally moving. The only real quibble with his treatment of the long-underappreciated Adams is that, like Catherine Drinker Bowen two generations ago (check out her bodice-heaving account of John & Abby's courtship in "John Adams & the American Revolution")McCullough seems to have yielded to the impulse to soften the edges of the oft-curmudgeonly Adams. It wasn't just his principled character that left his life littered with political enemies, and McCullough downplays his hero's rough edges in his quest to make John Adams another Trumanesque Man Of The People. It's a stirring read, though, and may lead lucky readers back to Adams' own writings, most especially the Autobiography, Diary and his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson.

Rating:
Summary: A great biography must be more than a good life's story.
Review: John Adams deserves a biography that will capture the whole of his dramatic, challenging, and adventurous life ... and oh, how I wish that David McCullough's book was it. The book has several strengths. McCullough clearly admires Adams, and he has done extensive research into the physical feel of Adams's life and times -- how it must have felt to ride horseback from Braintree, Massachusetts, to Philadelphia in January of 1776, for example. He also knows how to tell a story (though even for experts, the first chapter is so tangled in chronology that only the most attentive reader will be able to sort it out).

But ... there are a couple of large "buts" about this book.

The first is, in some ways, the "flip side" of the strength of this book. As with his life of Harry S Truman, McCullough is bent on giving us a sense of John Adams's life as he lived and felt it. But this emphasis on experience shortchanges the dimension of Adams that he most would have wanted posterity to know: Adams was an intellectual, often one of the most daring and profound thinkers of his time, and a key figure in what he deemed the greatest American contribution to world civilization -- the development of Americans' ideas about politics and constitutional government. Unfortunately, McCullough gives short shrift to John Adams's writings on these vital topics, writings over which Adams labored with such devotion and urgency. He does not grasp why Adams's magnificent pamphlet THOUGHTS ON GOVERNMENT (1776) was as important and influential as COMMON SENSE and as vital a landmark in the evolution of Americans' thinking about constitutional government, nor does he grasp the significance of Adams's other revolutionary writings. He quotes a few choice bits, retails some superficial conventional wisdom about them, and moves on. Interested readers should instead consult two books by C. Bradley Thompson -- JOHN ADAMS AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY [Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1998] and THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS OF JOHN ADAMS [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000.]

The second problem is McCullough's use of Adams's own words. Adams scholars will be alarmed and dismayed to find familiar quotations turn up in these pages truncated, even garbled. The reason is not hard to find. Turn to the last pages, where McCullough provides his references, and you will find that he is depending on Charles Francis Adams's 19th-century edition THE WORKS OF JOHN ADAMS, published between 1850 and 1856. The younger Adams was the best historical editor of his generation, but in the process of editing his grandfather he smoothed out John Adams's syntax and left the texts he published generally unreliable.

To be sure, the vast multivolume ADAMS PAPERS project has not probed far into John Adams's life. Certainly, however, for the period covered by Part I of this three-part life, the volumes are finished, and McCullough could have used them easily.

So, too, McCullough fails to take account in his pages of the burgeoning scholarship on John Adams; though he lists the books in his bibliography, his account of Adams's life leaves them far astern.

The challenge of writing a popular biography is considerable, but it should not be met at the expense of ignoring the intellectual dimension of one's subject or of scanting the extensive recent scholarship dealing with the person you're writing about. As with H. W. Brands's THE FIRST AMERICAN, on Benjamin Franklin, McCullough provides the joys and virtues of a good story but does almost nothing to explain why that story of a great life matters beyond its sheer entertainment value.

-- R. B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School