FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
One of America's greatest storytellers has turned to one of America's greatest stories as the source for his most recent inspiration: a tale of one of the most influential, and often the most misunderstood, Founding Fathers: John Adams. The result is a tour de force and pure joy for the reader.

John Adams is a sweeping epic, often cinematic in its lively sense of everyday detail, that moves at a wonderful pace from Adams's earliest days in Massachusetts as a country lawyer to the halcyon days of American Revolution; the enormous work of diplomacy in Paris, The Hague, and London; the earliest years of government in the fledgling Republic in both New York and Washington; and the establishment of the large Adams clan, whose own lives were to become so interwoven in the fabric of the young nation.

The book reexamines both the most famous and least well known stories of Adams's contribution to the experiment in American democracy -- from his complex and often troubled relationships to Thomas Jefferson and the manipulative Benjamin Franklin to a brilliant interweaving of some of the most moving of the now-famous conversations on paper between John and his beloved wife, Abigail.

David McCullough has given us a biography written in a style that allows us full glimpses into the workings of palace intrigue, early presidential scandals, the birth of the two-party system, and quiet days on a beloved farm: All are presented with a grace that makes this book an essential read for any lover of history. (Elena Simon)

Elena Simon lives in New York City.

ANNOTATION

Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot -- "the colossus of independence," as Thomas Jefferson called him -- who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second President of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as "out of his senses"; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history.

Like his masterly, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Truman, David McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. It is both a riveting portrait of an abundantly human man and a vivid evocation of his time, much of it drawn from an outstanding collection of Adams family letters and diaries. In particular, the more than one thousand surviving letters between John and Abigail Adams, nearly half of which have never been published, provide extraordinary access to their private lives and make it possible to know John Adams as no other major American of his founding era.

As he has with stunning effect in his previous books, McCullough tells the story from within -- from the point of view of the amazing eighteenth century and of those who, caught up in events, had no sure way of knowing how things would turn out. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, the British spy Edward Bancroft, Madame Lafayette and Jefferson's Paris "interest" Maria Cosway, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the scandalmonger James Callender, Sally Hemings, John Marshall, Talleyrand, and Aaron Burr all figure in this panoramic chronicle, as does, importantly, John Quincy Adams, the adored son whom Adams would live to see become President.

Crucial to the story, as it was to history, is the relationship between Adams and Jefferson, born opposites -- one a Massachusetts farmer's son, the other a Virginia aristocrat and slaveholder, one short and stout, the other tall and spare. Adams embraced conflict; Jefferson avoided it. Adams had great humor; Jefferson, very little. But they were alike in their devotion to their country. At first they were ardent co-revolutionaries, then fellow diplomats and close friends. With the advent of the two political parties, they became archrivals, even enemies, in the intense struggle for the presidency in 1800, perhaps the most vicious election in history. Then, amazingly, they became friends again, and ultimately, incredibly, they died on the same day -- their day of days -- July 4, in the year 1826.

Much about John Adams's life will come as a surprise to many readers. His courageous voyage on the frigate Boston in the winter of 1778 and his later trek over the Pyrenees are exploits that few would have dared and that few readers will ever forget.

It is a life encompassing a huge arc -- Adams lived longer than any president. The story ranges from the Boston Massacre to Philadelphia in 1776 to the Versailles of Louis XVI, from Spain to Amsterdam, from the Court of St. James's, where Adams was the first American to stand before King George III as a representative of the new nation, to the raw, half-finished Capital by the Potomac, where Adams was the first President to occupy the White House. This is history on a grand scale -- a book about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas.

Above all, John Adams is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

SYNOPSIS

Told by one of our country's greatest historians, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman, here is the extraordinary history of the birth of our country, seen through the lives of two extraordinary men: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Deftly, and with a key eye for detail, McCullough describes the childhood, youth, and coming of age of these two very different Americans who, though bitterly opposed to each other, profoundly influenced the destiny of America.

FROM THE CRITICS

Edwin M. Yoder - Washington Post Book World

The authentic John Adams has been concealed too long in the glamorous shadows of Jefferson and Washington, and some rectification is past due. McCullough's biography will go far to provide it, for none before it -- not even Gilbert Chinard's classic of a generation or more ago -- has attained its height of narrative art. But that is only to be expected of the writer who is our historian laureate in waiting.

Book Magazine

William Shakespeare could have found plenty of dramatic inspiration in the American Revolution. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were all larger-than-life figures with all-too-human complexities, engaged in an era of upheaval and conspiratorial intrigue. As for John Adams, Shakespeare had him nailed centuries before the fact: Adams is Polonius, a loquacious foil to the tragic Hamlet, an object of derision to others but never to himself. He is a conventionally minded man who speaks in platitudes, lacks the dimensions of greatness and can't comprehend how fatuous he sometimes seems to those who ridicule him. "Adams often felt ill at ease," writes David McCullough, whose biography combines scholarly research with the readability of historical fiction. "He sensed people were laughing at him, as sometimes they were, and this was especially hurtful." His ambition, his ego, his squat corpulence and ruddy complexion all made him subject to caricature. The man who was so ordinary when compared to the revolution's extraordinary figures showed a profound commitment to the country he served in so many pivotal ways. As both ambassador and president, Adams accepted responsibilities for which he'd had little experience, recognizing that few people in this young country were any better prepared for the challenges inherent in this experiment in democracy. McCullough makes it easy to understand why Adams would be both an attractive and sympathetic figure to the historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for his similarly expansive study of Harry Truman. Like Truman, Adams was a good-humored, sharp-tempered, fiercely independent man; he wasdevoid of aristocratic pretense and incapable of political artifice. "I am an ordinary man," he wrote in his diary. "The times alone have destined me to fame." Adams certainly rose to the challenges of his turbulent times. As a fledgling lawyer from a humble Massachusetts farm family, he seemed to follow an unerring moral compass, from his defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre on legal grounds, to his aggressive arguments for independence, well ahead of the curve of public sentiment. One of the most vocal advocates of the Declaration of Independence, he was the overseas ambassador charged with rallying foreign support to the fledgling nation. (France would have preferred his more revered cousin Samuel Adams, while Britain disparaged him as a nobody.) Rewarded upon his return home with his country's first vice presidency, Adams discovered that the office was no reward at all, "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived." He then had the unenviable task of succeeding the beloved Washington, becoming both the first president to occupy the White House and the first to be booted from it by the electorate, as partisanship turned increasingly acrimonious. He was also the first (until recently, the only) president to raise a son who would also be president. One of the more influential delegates to the Continental Congress, Adams established a mentor-protege friendship with the younger Thomas Jefferson, a relationship that would shape the lives of each to the end. "With Adams there was seldom a doubt about what he said," writes McCullough. "With Jefferson there was always a slight air of ambiguity." Eventually, Jefferson would both betray and defeat his former mentor—whom he considered a monarchist reactionary, at odds with Jefferson's beloved French Revolution—though they somehow resumed cordial correspondence once both had retired from politics. McCullough's account leaves little doubt that, while Jefferson had the more brilliant mind, Adams was the better friend. "He wished to be President of the United States, and I stood in his way," Adams remarked of Jefferson, after wounds had healed. "But if I should quarrel with him for that, I might quarrel with every man I have ever had anything to do with in life. This is human nature." According to McCullough, the best of human nature is exemplified through his subject's marriage to Abigail Adams—"the most important decision of John Adams' life." It is a love that further humanizes this biography (while contrasting sharply with the Clintonian hedonism of Jefferson). Esteemed throughout colonial society for her essential goodness and lively mind, without the reservations so often attached to her husband, Abigail served as his ideal. "Where others might see a stout, bluff little man," writes the biographer, "she saw a giant of great heart." McCullough writes of his subject with warmth and respect but not reverence, and the truth about Adams falls somewhere between his wife's assessment of his character and Benjamin Franklin's famous description of him as "always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." After a presidency troubled by a holdover cabinet that remained loyal to Washington, dissension over relations with both Great Britain and France and acceptance of the Sedition Act (which threatened anyone criticizing the president with imprisonment), Adams enjoyed his happiest decades once he retired to his farm, his library and his voluminous correspondence. John Adams lived to be ninety-one years old, long enough to see his son John Quincy elected to the presidency. He died on the same day as Thomas Jefferson—July 4, 1826, as the country was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Shakespeare couldn't have scripted it more poetically. —Don McLeese

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. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This life of Adams is an extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary man who has not received his due in America's early political history but whose life work significantly affected his country's future. McCullough is here following his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Truman, and his subjects have much in common as leaders who struggled to establish their own presidential identities as they emerged from the shadows of their revered predecessors. The author paints a portrait of Adams, the patriot, in the fullest sense of the word. The reader is treated to engaging descriptions and accounts of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, among others, as well as the significant figures in the Adams family: Abigail, John's love and full partner, and son John Quincy. In tracing Adams's life from childhood through his many critical, heroic, and selfless acts during the Revolution, his vice presidency under Washington, and his own term as president, the full measure of Adams a man widely regarded in his time as the equal of Jefferson, Hamilton, and all of the other Founding Fathers is revealed. This excellent biography deserves a wide audience. Thomas J. Baldino, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews