From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This new biography by Grant, who has written previously on financial history (Money of the Mind), gives us John Adams's life in vivid detail. In his New England childhood, the amorous and "bookish" Adams grew up in a four-room farmhouse, the eldest of three children—"by prevailing standards of fertility, almost an only child." The heart of the book chronicles Adams's involvement in the Revolution, from his early praise of the Boston Tea Party through his stint as postwar diplomat in France. His presidency seems almost an afterthought, with almost as much space devoted to fleshing out the details of his narrow victory . One might have liked a richer depiction of Adams's friendship, falling out, rapprochement, and brilliant correspondence with Jefferson. But if that storied friendship gets short shrift, Adams's personal thoughts about wealth, and his worries about luxury corrupting the American republic, are afforded just the sort of detail one expects from a writer with Grant's financial acumen. He ably joins the shelves of recent books on the founding fathers. For Grant's sake, one hopes that David McCullough whetted, rather than sated appetites. If this biography is not quite as grand as McCullough's, it is every bit as eloquent and deserves a wide reading. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In the current Adams revival, the second president comes in three sizes: large (John Adams, by David McCullough, 2001); medium (Grant's volume); and small (John Adams, by John Diggins, 2003). The latter concentrated on Adams' contentious presidency, so those desiring the full Adams in half McCullough's length will choose Grant. A financial journalist, Grant astutely appraises one of Adams' unsung achievements--arranging foreign loans that financed the War of Independence; indeed, Adams' 10 years as a diplomat (1778-88) strike the author as his subject's signal contribution to the American Revolution. Grant is less admiring when it comes to Adams' personality, conditioning his praise with amusing asides about Adams' social and political gaucheries. As the book's subtitle implies, Adams was little influenced by opinions about him: he was a libertarian, not a democrat. Grant is excellent at developing Adams' devotion to liberty, honed by British policies that affronted him and turned him into a revolutionary. In Grant's fine synthesis, Adams on the page is the pious, ambitious, and loving man he was in life. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Wall Street Journal
"Engaging...rich in detail, ably researched and frequently fresh."
Review
"Grant's wise and witty portrayal of John Adams deserves to go to the top of the lengthening list of biographies of the several Founding Fathers. No portrayal of Adams and his times is as perceptive, solidly grounded in the sources, and as delightfully written as is this book." --Paul C. Nagel, author of Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family and The Adams Women: Abigail and Louisa Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters
"Grant’s John Adams: Party of One should become the standard one volume on the second President’s life. Jim Grant is a virtuoso financial historian, American historian and master of the English language. From Grant, John Adams gets his just reward--a deeply researched, honest, marvelously written biography." --Lewis Lehrman,Lewis E. Lehrman, Co-Chairman, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
"This is much more than the curmudgeonly, financially-sophisticated view of a financially sophisticated curmudgeon you might expect of Mr. Grant, author of four notable books on finance and financial history. Well-wrought and scrupulous, John Adams: Party of One is written with elegance and a subtle understanding that rises to eloquence where eloquence matters, and builds to affectionate and moving truth." --Roger Kennedy, Director Emeritus, The National Museum of American History
"In this first-rate biography, Jim Grant delivers an effervescent life of John Adams that sparkles with classic wit, droll charm, and an engaging whimsy that perfectly suits both the subject and the period. Going beyond the humorous anecdotes and satirical asides that enliven his narrative, however, Grant sketches a poignant portrait of a doughty, stubborn, and many-sided man who defies easy generalizations. Whether as a lawyer, patriot, diplomat, or president, John Adams was a certified American original--a 'party of one,' as the subtitle intimates--and this biography, brimming with verbal riches, proves no less singular than its protagonist." --Ron Chernow, author of Alexander Hamilton
Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Highly readable...examines [Adams's] early life and his public career...recounts all of this with verve, wit and eloquence."
Providence Journal
"One gets the sense that old Adams, [would] greatly appreciate Mr. Grant's shrewd and witty biography."
The New York Sun
"Demonstrates what the romance of biography is all about."
Book Description
An acute examination of a paradoxical U.S. president.
John Adams was an undiplomatic diplomat and an impolitic politician--a fierce revolutionary yet a detached and reluctant leader of the nation he helped to found. Few American public figures have ever been more devoted to doing the right thing, or more contemptuous of doing the merely popular thing. Yet his Yankee-bred fixation with ethical propriety and fiscal conservatism never stood in the way of his doing what was necessary. Adams hated debt, but as minister to the Netherlands during the Revolution, he was America's premier junk-bond salesman. And though raised a traditional Massachusetts Congregationalist, Adams was instrumental in bringing about the consecration of the first American Episcopal bishops. He was a warm and magnanimous friend and, on occasion, a man who fully vindicated the famous judgment of a rival he detested. Adams, said Benjamin Franklin, "means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but, sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely out of his senses."
James Grant examines this complex and often contradictory founding father in the most well-rounded and multi-faceted portrait of Adams to date. Going from his beginnings on a hardscrabble Massachusetts farm to the Continental Congress to the Court of St. James and the White House, Grant traces the words and deeds of one of our most learned but politically star-crossed leaders.
About the Author
James Grant is the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer and the author of four books on finance and financial history, including Money of the Mind (FSG, 1992) and Minding Mr. Market (FSG, 1993). He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Patricia Kavanagh, and their four children.
John Adams: Party of One FROM THE PUBLISHER
"John Adams was an undiplomatic diplomat and an impolite politician - a fierce revolutionary, yet a detached and reluctant leader of the nation he helped to found. Few American public figures have ever been more devoted to doing the right thing, or more contemptuous of doing the merely popular thing. Yet his Yankee-bred fixation with ethical propriety and fiscal conservatism never stood in the way of his doing what was necessary. Adams hated debt but, as minister to the Netherlands during the Revolution, was America's premier junk-bond salesman. And though raised as a traditional Massachusetts Congregationalist, Adams was instrumental in bringing about the consecration of the first American Episcopal bishops. He was a warm and magnanimous friend and, on occasion, a man who fully vindicated the famous judgment of a rival he detested: Adams, said Benjamin Franklin, "means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but, sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely out of his senses."" James Grant examines this complex and often contradictory Founding Father in the most well-rounded and multifaceted portrait of Adams to date. Chronicling Adams's life - from his beginnings on a hardscrabble Massachusetts farm to the Continental Congress, the Court of St. James, and the White House - Grant traces the words and deeds of one of our most learned but politically star-crossed leaders.
FROM THE CRITICS
William Grimes - The New York Times
In this urbane, gracefully written biography, James Grant wages the kind of tough, uphill battle that his tough-minded subject would appreciate, acknowledging Adams's weaknesses and character flaws, appraising his political blunders coolly but in the end leaving the reader with a richer appreciation of the Adams that Abigail and Jefferson saw, a man of firm principles who, for most of his very long life, labored tirelessly for the country-in-the-making whose future he never doubted, even when those around him wavered and trembled.
Dennis Drabelle - The Washington Post
The Founding Fathers boomlet continues unabated. We can't seem to read enough about this group of men who had not only great talents but great luck: Few men are so privileged as to get to create a form of government. One of those favored ones, John Adams, has already been given sympathetic treatment by David McCullough; in John Adams: Party of One,, he receives another nuanced portrait, this time by James Grant, who has previously written on financial history.
Publishers Weekly
This new biography by Grant, who has written previously on financial history (Money of the Mind), gives us John Adams's life in vivid detail. In his New England childhood, the amorous and bookish Adams grew up in a four-room farmhouse, the eldest of three children by prevailing standards of fertility, almost an only child. The heart of the book chronicles Adams's involvement in the Revolution, from his early praise of the Boston Tea Party through his stint as postwar diplomat in France. His presidency seems almost an afterthought, with almost as much space devoted to fleshing out the details of his narrow victory . One might have liked a richer depiction of Adams's friendship, falling out, rapprochement, and brilliant correspondence with Jefferson. But if that storied friendship gets short shrift, Adams's personal thoughts about wealth, and his worries about luxury corrupting the American republic, are afforded just the sort of detail one expects from a writer with Grant's financial acumen. He ably joins the shelves of recent books on the founding fathers. For Grant's sake, one hopes that David McCullough whetted, rather than sated appetites. If this biography is not quite as grand as McCullough's, it is every bit as eloquent and deserves a wide reading. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
After years of undeserved neglect, John Adams has recently reemerged as a popular member of the Founding Fathers. In 2000, Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothers identified Adams as a key figure among the Founders, while 2001 brought David McCullough's John Adams, an excellent biography of the man that also drew sharp portraits of Jefferson and Hamilton. With this work, Grant, the author of several books on finance and financial history and editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, presents a more traditional biography of the second president. Using some of the same primary sources as McCullough, Grant offers a study of Adams's personal life in some ways richer and more complete that McCullogh's, but it lacks the insightful analysis of Adams's relations with Jefferson, Washington, and their compatriots. A complement to McCullough, this is worth purchasing by libraries wishing to expand their collections on the young American Republic. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/04.]-Thomas J. Baldino, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An agile life of Adams, "the unbeloved 'president by three votes.'" Historians have been paying greater attention to the hitherto-overlooked second president in the wake of David McCullough's magisterial John Adams (2001) and the contested presidential election of 2000 (see David Ferling's John Adams vs. Jefferson, 2004). Financial historian Grant (Money of the Mind, 1992, etc.) focuses on Adams as a politician and revolutionary, but also as an economic thinker and sometimes ambivalent philosopher. Raised a Puritan, for instance, Adams had no lack of work ethic yet was, at least in his youth, "dull, lazy, unobservant, and confused"; when he was supposed to be studying or working, Adams could often be found eating, smoking, "gallanting the girls" or drinking. On the last matter, Adams was especially of two minds; fond of a dram himself, he was unsure whether to campaign against the taverns of Braintree, Massachusetts. Marrying Abigail, with whom he had a tender and playful relationship, was a step in the right direction, and when it came time to draw up the Declaration of Independence, Adams was no stranger to hard work. Grant points out that Adams served on more than 30 congressional committees, was active in drafting American foreign policy, and was constantly on the run even while predicting that he would soon die from sheer exhaustion. Though most of his pages are devoted to events before 1781, Grant gives generous coverage to Adams's post-revolutionary career, when, first, he became vice president and wrestled with the fundamental cheapness of a people that did not wish to be taxed and a Congress that did not want to spend, then became president-by a slender margin indeed-and facedwith difficulties of establishing a secular, democratic government in a God-haunted nation that, even then, was beginning to crack apart under the weight of slavery. A well-researched complement to McCullough's somewhat more accessible life: of much interest to students of the early Republic and the revolutionary era.
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