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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..
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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.
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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.
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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
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Summary: Perhaps David McCullough's greatest achievement...
Review: This book is an outstanding success on so many levels. The writing is most lyrical and beautiful...there is not one wasted word in the whole book. It's a book that is difficult to put down for the night. Perhaps the greatest success of the book is the correction of many John Adams stereotypes. In this book you meet a John Adams who is a delightful wit, a man deeply in love with his nation, and more-so with his wife. Mr. McCullough also gives Abigail Adams her due as a most delightful person and one of the most important women in our history. The love the couple shared is as deep a love as humans are possible of giving and receiving, and that love is radiated to you from the pages of this book. A warrning to Jefferson fanatics...during his research, I think McCullough, perhaps more than anybody else, gained a true understanding of Thomas Jefferson and has done the nearly impossible...portraying Jefferson as a human being. As a human being, Jefferson loses some of his shine. As a human being, john Adams shines even brighter. Mr. McCullough has done with John Adams what he did with Harry Truman a few years ago...he has restored the lustre of a truly great and underrated American. I hope that preparing this book gave Mr. McCullough as much pleasure as I had reading it.
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Summary: Excellent
Review: Extraordinary and deeply moving. I can't believe no one else has read and reviewed it here yet. And at my local library, there are fewer patrons on the waiting list for it than there are copies of it on order. How sad that we find it harder and harder to be interested in any phase of our history that isn't of our own or our parents' lifetime. Americans should take a year off and travel abroad to appreciate just how "recent" the Declaration of Independence really was.
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Summary: Of Tragedy, Triumph, and Liberty
Review: We are fortunate to have writers like David McCullough, willing to do the painstaking research to capture the essence and spirit of America's Founding Fathers and of the liberty they've earned for posterity. Before the revisionists have completely twisted the men and women of the America Revolution into their own warped views "political correctness", it is refreshing to have this tale recorded in McCullough's lucid and moving prose. This is not to say that McCullough deifies Adams or his contemporaries. Rather, based primarily on the prolific writings of John and Abigail Adams to each other, their family, friends and associates over the course of more than sixty years, Adams emerges as a tragic hero, the irascible and stubborn patriot whose love of country and liberty ultimately leads to his own political demise. Unlike so many of our politician's today, Adams emerges as the unselfish leader putting country before political party and personal gain, fully realizing the devastating personal consequences. But "John Adams" is much more than the biography of the Founding Father sometimes lost in the long shadows cast by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton. Indeed, it is a biography of America, first in breaking free from England, and later in struggling to gain identity and credibility from the arrogance and treachery of the European nations. McCullough's research goes broad and deep, encapsulating events shaping history on both sides of the Atlantic, often as seen through the eyes of John Adams while serving abroad as minister to both Britain and France, and simultaneously through Abigail's pen as she relates the increasingly desperate situation in America. Given Adams' roles in the Declaration of Independence, the Massachusetts Constitution, in securing recognition and loans from the Netherlands, and in negotiations with Britain ending the Revolutionary War, his election to president is somewhat anticlimactic - seen more as fulfilling a duty than as a coveted prize. But of keen interest is relationship between Adams and Jefferson, a complex web of friendship and betrayal, of noble cause and of politics at its worst. The young Jefferson, soft-spoken and mildly introverted, is admired by Adams for the purity of his intellect and reason. They become friends during the early days of the Continental Congress, where Jefferson emerges as the "pen" of liberty, while Adams, on the strength of oratory that is more dogged than eloquent, is the "voice". But once the Federalist Adams ascends to the presidency, an unenviable task filling the shoes of the beloved George Washington, Republican Jefferson, Adams' vice president, begins sowing the seeds leading to the destruction of his once-friend's political career. It is ironic that Jefferson, a Virginia aristocrat and slave owner who lived like royalty is popularly viewed as a "Man of the People", while Adams, a simple farmer who despised slavery, was depicted as a Monarchist who would enslave the common man. It is interesting that in over two centuries, politics have not evolved above the innuendo and outright lies so prevalent in the political process of today. McCullough's "John Adams" is far more than a brilliant chronicle John Adams' significant role in the birth of America. Rather, while the times in which we live may seem troubled, given the challenges and sacrifices of John Adams and his fellow patriots, our issues seem trivial by comparison. "John Adams" is a triumph of hope and inspiration, and unvarnished and compelling portrait of America and a great American during a tumultuous and pivotal period in world history. Regardless of which side of the political spectrum one is on, McCullough adds an important perspective of our nation's heritage and passion.
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Summary: Historical and Great!
Review: This book is a welcome surprise to the often-dry genre of "historical biography." McCullough's historical prowess is evident throughout, employing a wide variety of primary sources. That is, John Adams's own attention to correspondence and loyalty to journaling help the reader achieve a greater intimacy with characters. The entire book revels in emotional details, connecting the generations of McCullough and Adams. The book is filled with facts. Unfortunately, Adams's contribution to American foreign and domestic policy is often overshadowed by the popularity of men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; McCullough is successful in proving otherwise, despite a wanning of details in Adams's political carrerr, in comparison to the overwhelming personal connections in the book. Nevertheless, perfect for historians, students, and casual readers alike, the book is an excellent read I would highly recommend to any person of the globe wanting insight into John Adams, his time, or the founding of America.
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Summary: One of the best biographies I have read...
Review: This book is a very readable book. Unlike some other history books which are dry, this one reads like a novel. I loved how they showed the personal side of a public man. His loving relationship with his wife Abigail is revealed through letters he wrote her. I also loved how the author described John Adams relationship with Thomas Jefferson, down to the little details like when they shared a room in philly one wanted the window open and the other wanted it closed. This book shows that the founding fathers did not live in a vacuum, all alone, responding to each others politics; but that they were freinds with complex relationships. I like how this book lets us see our countries greatest patriots as real people. I highly reccomend this book, there is a sage like quality to it. If this was the kind of reading offered in high school or college, I might have been more interested in history.
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Summary: The Autobiography Adams Never Wrote
Review: It is amazing to think of the process through which we might pick up a mass of paper and thumb through the life of a man who so profoundly influenced the modern world though he lived nearly two centuries ago. Needless to say, this book drew me into the depths of a mind and life that was so unfamiliar to me previously. Through Adams' correspondence to his friends, his opponents, his family, and his love, (as displayed throughout the book) we have a general sense that the voice of Adams is indeed speaking through McCullough.
It seemed as if I was reading the autobiography that John Adams never wrote.
This work travels through some of the most difficult and defining years of the United States of America and provides an insight into the contributions that John and Abigail Adams made to the prosperity of a nation. I think that the author recreates situations and circumstances wherein we are allowed to laugh, smile, become angry, and even mourn with both the Adams. If nothing else, we learn so much about the revolutionary period and the founding of our nation because John Adams lived through it all. This book may move you in a sincere way.
What bars me from giving this work a 5 star rating rather than 4 is one of the very reasons that I love this book - the apparent lack of objectivity as evidenced through the author's love and fascination for John Adams. Being the case, I would give it 4 ½ if allowed. Essentially, we are given a view of Adams' life through (more or less) the lens of Adams own eyes.
Apart from my only qualm, the book is very readable. As mentioned in a prior review, McCullough is a wonderful storyteller - he draws a picture of Adams, his times, and his experiences so well that you can see it all when you close your eyes. There are very few areas where this book becomes an arduous read. It is a wonderful portrait of a wonderful man, a historical and educational piece worth your time, and great accomplishment to which you may tell your friends, "Yes, I did read through the 656 pages of this book (the other 95 are notes, the bibliography, and the index)." McCullough leaves no question as to why he is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
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