John Adams

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	John Adams
	by David McCullough Sales Rank: 6380	~~List Price: $20.00~~ $13.60 At Amazon on 6-21-2008.

*Features* Cover Type: Paperback with 752 pages Published by: Simon & Schuster; 1st Touchstone edition September 3, 2002 Written in: English ISBN 10 Number: 0743223136 ISBN 13 Number: 978-0743223133 Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches Weighs: 2.2 pounds Amazon.com's Best of 2001 Left to his own devices, John Adams might have lived out his days as a Massachusetts country lawyer, devoted to his family and friends. As it was, events swiftly overtook him, and Adams--who, David McCullough writes, was "not a man of the world" and not fond of politics--came to greatness as the second president of the United States, and one of the most distinguished of a generation of revolutionary leaders. He found reason to dislike sectarian wrangling even more in the aftermath of war, when Federalist and anti-Federalist factions vied bitterly for power, introducing scandal into an administration beset by other difficulties--including pirates on the high seas, conflict with France and England, and all the public controversy attendant in building a nation. Overshadowed by the lustrous presidents Washington and Jefferson, who bracketed his tenure in office, Adams emerges from McCullough's brilliant biography as a truly heroic figure--not only for his significant role in the American Revolution but also for maintaining his personal integrity in its strife-filled aftermath. McCullough spends much of his narrative looking at the troubled friendship between Adams and Jefferson, who had in common a love for books and ideas but differed on almost every other imaginable point. Reading his pages, it is easy to imagine the two as alter egos. (Strangely, both died on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.) But McCullough also considers Adams in his own light, and the portrait that emerges is altogether fascinating. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. *From Publishers Weekly* Here a preeminent master of narrative history takes on the most fascinating of our founders to create a benchmark for all Adams biographers. With a keen eye for telling detail and a master storyteller's instinct for human interest, McCullough (Truman; Mornings on Horseback) resurrects the great Federalist (1735-1826), revealing in particular his restrained, sometimes off-putting disposition, as well as his political guile. The events McCullough recounts are well-known, but with his astute marshaling of facts, the author surpasses previous biographers in depicting Adams's years at Harvard, his early public life in Boston and his role in the first Continental Congress, where he helped shape the philosophical basis for the Revolution. McCullough also makes vivid Adams's actions in the second Congress, during which he was the first to propose George Washington to command the new Continental Army. Later on, we see Adams bickering with Tom Paine's plan for government as suggested in Common Sense, helping push through the draft for the Declaration of Independence penned by his longtime friend and frequent rival, Thomas Jefferson, and serving as commissioner to France and envoy to the Court of St. James's. The author is likewise brilliant in portraying Adams's complex relationship with Jefferson, who ousted him from the White House in 1800 and with whom he would share a remarkable death date 26 years later: July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration. (June) Forecast: Joseph Ellis has shown us the Founding Fathers can be bestsellers, and S&S knows it has a winner: first printing is 350,000 copies, and McCullough will go on a 15-city tour; both Book-of-the-Month Club and the History Book Club have taken this book as a selection. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. *Reader Reviews* This review is from: John Adams (Hardcover) 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 Comments (7) \| \| (Report this) Back To Top
John Adams Available from Amazon Price: $13.60 Updated on 6-21-2008.

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