|
|
John Adams (Paperback)
by David McCullough
| Category:
American history, Founding history of America |
| Market price: ¥ 238.00
MSL price:
¥ 208.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
|
|
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A standard McCullough work - part scholarship, part entertainment, and part American boosterism, John Adams is another fine addition to McCullough's line of Great Man biographies. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: David McCullough
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Touchstone edition
Pub. in: September, 2002
ISBN: 0743223136
Pages: 752
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00225
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0743223133
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
Winner of Pulitzer Prize. Amazon.com's Best of 2001.
|
|
- MSL Picks -
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.
(From quoting Gary Griffiths, USA)
Target readers:
American history lovers, biography lovers, readers interested in John Adams or David McCullough's works, English majors, and advanced English learners.
|
|
- Better with -
Better with
1776
:
|
|
Customers who bought this product also bought:
 |
1776 (Paperback)
by David McCullough
Another product of David McCullough's genius in making history come to life, this landmark book in the literature of American history is history in fiction form. |
 |
Truman (Paperback)
by David McCullough
Hailed by critics as a true masterpiece, David McCullough's sweeping biography of Truman provides a deeply moving look at an extraordinary, singular American and has captured the heart of the nation. |
 |
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Paperback)
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
An amazing biography of Abraham Lincoln, a man of remarkable courage and self-confidence and an unmatched leader. |
|
|
David McCullough was born in 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and educated there and at Yale. Author of Truman, Brave Companions, Mornings on Horseback, The Path Between the Seas, The Great Bridge, and The Johnstown Flood, he has received the Pulitzer Prize (in 1993, for Truman), the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and is twice winner of the National Book Award.
|
|
From 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 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.
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.
|
Chapter One: The Road to Philadelphia
You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator... We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them. - Abigail Adams
I
In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north. A foot or more of snow covered the landscape, the remnants of a Christmas storm that had blanketed Massachusetts from one end of the province to the other. Beneath the snow, after weeks of severe cold, the ground was frozen solid to a depth of two feet. Packed ice in the road, ruts as hard as iron, made the going hazardous, and the riders, mindful of the horses, kept at a walk.
Nothing about the harsh landscape differed from other winters. Nor was there anything to distinguish the two riders, no signs of rank or title, no liveried retinue bringing up the rear. It might have been any year and they could have been anybody braving the weather for any number of reasons. Dressed as they were in heavy cloaks, their hats pulled low against the wind, they were barely distinguishable even from each other, except that the older, stouter of the two did most of the talking.
He was John Adams of Braintree and he loved to talk. He was a known talker. There were some, even among his admirers, who wished he talked less. He himself wished he talked less, and he had particular regard for those, like General Washington, who somehow managed great reserve under almost any circumstance.
John Adams was a lawyer and a farmer, a graduate of Harvard College, the husband of Abigail Smith Adams, the father of four children. He was forty years old and he was a revolutionary.
Dismounted, he stood five feet seven or eight inches tall - about "middle size" in that day - and though verging on portly, he had a straight-up, square-shouldered stance and was, in fact, surprisingly fit and solid. His hands were the hands of a man accustomed to pruning his own trees, cutting his own hay, and splitting his own firewood.
In such bitter cold of winter, the pink of his round, clean-shaven, very English face would all but glow, and if he were hatless or without a wig, his high forehead and thinning hairline made the whole of the face look rounder still. The hair, light brown in color, was full about the ears. The chin was firm, the nose sharp, almost birdlike. But it was the dark, perfectly arched brows and keen blue eyes that gave the face its vitality. Years afterward, recalling this juncture in his life, he would describe himself as looking rather like a short, thick Archbishop of Canterbury.
As befitting a studious lawyer from Braintree, Adams was a "plain dressing" man. His oft-stated pleasures were his family, his farm, his books and writing table, a convivial pipe and cup of coffee (now that tea was no longer acceptable), or preferably a glass of good Madeira.
In the warm seasons he relished long walks and time alone on horseback. Such exercise, he believed, roused "the animal spirits" and "dispersed melancholy." He loved the open meadows of home, the "old acquaintances" of rock ledges and breezes from the sea. From his doorstep to the water's edge was approximately a mile.
He was a man who cared deeply for his friends, who, with few exceptions, were to be his friends for life, and in some instances despite severe strains. And to no one was he more devoted than to his wife, Abigail. She was his "Dearest Friend," as he addressed her in letters - his "best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in the world" - while to her he was "the tenderest of husbands," her "good man."
John Adams was also, as many could attest, a great-hearted, persevering man of uncommon ability and force. He had a brilliant mind. He was honest and everyone knew it. Emphatically independent by nature, hardworking, frugal - all traits in the New England tradition - he was anything but cold or laconic as supposedly New Englanders were. He could be high-spirited and affectionate, vain, cranky, impetuous, self-absorbed, and fiercely stubborn; passionate, quick to anger, and all-forgiving; generous and entertaining. He was blessed with great courage and good humor, yet subject to spells of despair, and especially when separated from his family or during periods of prolonged inactivity.
Ambitious to excel - to make himself known - he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness came not from fame and fortune, "and all such things," but from "an habitual contempt of them," as he wrote. He prized the Roman ideal of honor, and in this, as in much else, he and Abigail were in perfect accord. Fame without honor, in her view, would be "like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light."
As his family and friends knew, Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that. He was hardheaded and a man of "sensibility," a close observer of human folly as displayed in everyday life and fired by an inexhaustible love of books and scholarly reflection. He read Cicero, Tacitus, and others of his Roman heroes in Latin, and Plato and Thucydides in the original Greek, which he considered the supreme language. But in his need to fathom the "labyrinth" of human nature, as he said, he was drawn to Shakespeare and Swift, and likely to carry Cervantes or a volume of English poetry with him on his journeys. "You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket," he would tell his son Johnny.
John Adams was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter. He owned no ships or glass factory as did Colonel Josiah Quincy, Braintree's leading citizen. There was no money in his background, no Adams fortune or elegant Adams homestead like the Boston mansion of John Hancock.
It was in the courtrooms of Massachusetts and on the printed page, principally in the newspapers of Boston, that Adams had distinguished himself. Years of riding the court circuit and his brilliance before the bar had brought him wide recognition and respect. And of greater consequence in recent years had been his spirited determination and eloquence in the cause of American rights and liberties.
That he relished the sharp conflict and theater of the courtroom, that he loved the esteem that came with public life, no less than he loved "my farm, my family and goose quill," there is no doubt, however frequently he protested to the contrary. His desire for "distinction" was too great. Patriotism burned in him like a blue flame. "I have a zeal at my heart for my country and her friends which I cannot smother or conceal," he told Abigail, warning that it could mean privation and unhappiness for his family unless regulated by cooler judgment than his own.
In less than a year's time, as a delegate to the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, he had emerged as one of the most "sensible and forcible" figures in the whole patriot cause, the "Great and Common Cause," his influence exceeding even that of his better-known kinsman, the ardent Boston patriot Samuel Adams.
He was a second cousin of Samuel Adams, but "possessed of another species of character," as his Philadelphia friend Benjamin Rush would explain. "He saw the whole of a subject at a glance, and... was equally fearless of men and of the consequences of a bold assertion of his opinion... He was a stranger to dissimulation."
It had been John Adams, in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, who rose in the Congress to speak of the urgent need to save the New England army facing the British at Boston and in the same speech called on Congress to put the Virginian George Washington at the head of the army. That was now six months past. The general had since established a command at Cambridge, and it was there that Adams was headed. It was his third trip in a week to Cambridge, and the beginning of a much longer undertaking by horseback. He would ride on to Philadelphia, a journey of nearly 400 miles that he had made before, though never in such punishing weather or at so perilous an hour for his country.
The man riding with him was Joseph Bass, a young shoemaker and Braintree neighbor hired temporarily as servant and traveling companion.
The day was Wednesday, January 24, 1776. The temperature, according to records kept by Adams's former professor of science at Harvard, John Winthrop, was in the low twenties. At the least, the trip would take two weeks, given the condition of the roads and Adams's reluctance to travel on the Sabbath.
To Abigail Adams, who had never been out of Massachusetts, the province of Pennsylvania was "that far country," unimaginably distant, and their separations, lasting months at a time, had become extremely difficult for her.
"Winter makes its approaches fast," she had written to John in November. "I hope I shall not be obliged to spend it without my dearest friend.. I have been like a nun in a cloister ever since you went away."
He would never return to Philadelphia without her, he had vowed in a letter from his lodgings there. But they each knew better, just as each understood the importance of having Joseph Bass go with him. The young man was a tie with home, a familiar home-face. Once Adams had resettled in Philadelphia, Bass would return home with the horses, and bring also whatever could be found of the "common small" necessities impossible to obtain now, with war at the doorstep...
|
|
| View all 15 comments |
Walter Isaacson (Time) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
A masterwork of storytelling. |
Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Lucid and compelling... [Written] in a fluent narrative style that combines a novelist's sense of drama with a scholar's meticulous attention to the historical record. |
Marie Arana (The Washington Post) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
McCullough is one of our most gifted living writers. |
Gordon S. Wood (The New York Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
By far the best biography of Adams ever written... McCullough's special gift as an artist is his ability to re-create past human beings in all their fullness and all their humanity. In John and Abigail he has found characters worthy of his talent.
|
View all 15 comments |
|
|
|
|
