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Summary: This edition is especially great because...
Review: it has thorough, helpful notes that help fill in the historical gaps in the book. I was hooked straight from the beginning when I saw the detatched way that he was going to try and write about himself in the third person. He writes beautifully, and thankfully, he doesn't stay too detatched, nor is he quite reliable. He's way too "modest" about his abilities and education. But the sadness that comes as he gets older, the pace changes, and the energy shift, is amazing. You also see the world that he lived in, and for someone of his time, the extensive travels and encounters that he experienced surely cannot have been surpassed. The book is a lesson on massachusetts political, religious, and philosophical thought, as well as a critique of that fromsomeone who explored the rest of the world. There are certain parts of the book which relate to local current politics of the time which may not be of interest to anyone but real historians. But overall, this is an excellent read for anyone. It is a book about human experience and education.
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Summary: An uneven but rich take on a world in transition
Review: Its funny how some reading experiences emcompass more than just the book itself. In the case of Henry Adams autobiographical essay collection, The Education of Henry Adams, I always think of a sunny day in the park. The first time I read the book I was still in High School and believed that I had an obligation to read all those books that had been identified as "classics". This was one. I read most of it one afternoon while sitting under a large oak tree in Shelby Park in Nashville, TN. I remember contrasting the gloom and pessimism of Adams thought with the sunny day and the optimistic prospects I believed the future held for me. I argued with him as I read. I thought his reaction to Darwin, for example, was misplaced and in bad faith. I thoroughly disagreed with his argument in the chapter "The Virgin and the Dynamo"; I felt I knew enough about the Middle Ages to prefer living in a time of electric lights, running water, medical science and imperfect democracy than in a hovel in some Medieval village dominated by King and the Roman Catholic Church. I dismissed Henry Adams as a whiner and an educated misfit who had nothing to say to me.Its also funny how the passage of time changes one's perceptions. Rereading the book a couple of decades later I was surprised to find how much Adams and I had in common. I still didn't agree with his particular nostalgia for a time he had never experienced except in his imagination, but his sense of loss, of powerlessness, of the world slipping into some dangerous entropic state, all rang true to me. I also had read enough history of the 19th Century to appreciate more his many insightful anecdotes of the period. The subtlety of his humor and the richness of his writing style I also found appealing. I found this reading to be a much more rewarding experience - and I can't tell you a thing about where I was at the time, except deeply into the book.
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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: 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.
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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.
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Summary: At first read, you'll hate it...later you'll appreciate it!
Review: Searching for an education is the basis of this autobiography of Henry Adams, grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams. His search for an education leads to him re-examine his childhood, he college years, his travels, and other important parts of his life. To be honest, I read this book for a college autobiography course and I was one of very few students in the class who liked the book. Adams is extremely thorough and descriptive in the novel which makes the novel hard to read and understand. The reader will very often have to look up words. To put it more generally, it reads like a history textbook throughout. After first reading the book, I hated it. The more I thought about it though, I came to realize that it was an excellent book. Adams is a talented and artistic writer and the book is a wonderfully written historical novel. If you enjoy politics and/or history, you will enjoy this book!
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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.
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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.
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Summary: Searching for an education
Review: The Autobiography of Henry Adams details his lifelong search for a useful education. It takes some time to see that Adams is poking fun at himself for how little formal education takes with him. There are certainly some great truths in this book--how what we learn is not always what we start out to study, how the most valuable lessons often come from unexpected sources and even from great failures, how education is truly a lifelong pursuit, and how much of what one would like to know concerning the meaning of life is ultimately unknowable. At the same time, Henry seems to have been overwhelmed by the accomplishments of his ancestors and the autobiography is something of a justification for a life not fully lived. I could not help feeling that had Henry had a real need to work for a living, he might have gotten more out of his education, both formal and otherwise. Some of the events and historical figures that Adams discusses are relatively obscure for a modern audience.
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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.
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