…John Adams,

in the thick of it…

Book review:

John Adams

by David McCullough (1933-2022)

Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001

751 pages

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you don’t think biography is the best way to do history. David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winner is a reason to change your mind a bit.

John Adams, simply, is a really good book. McCullough helps you to warm up to this American icon and to his personal experience in leading the American Revolution and the first formative years of the American republic.

Adams, our first vice president and second president, was among the few who were in the thick of it from the beginning, and he never shrank from doing what he expansively viewed as his duty to his new country.

McCullough’s prose is a delightful experience for the serious historian and for the armchair dabbler who likes a good read. From cover to cover, John Adams is a lush, genuine presentation of a man, his loved ones, his career, his commitment to do good works and his never-flagging appreciation that the object of government should be to do the people’s business and make possible a decent life for all.

Adams, of course, couldn’t stop himself from being a politician, and he wasn’t the nicest kind.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were among the lowest points of American politics.

* * * * * *

Book review: Who Built America?

…including people

who got their hands dirty

by Christopher Clark and Nancy Hewitt

click here

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,

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