A thoughtful account of John Adams’ ideas and life, warts and all.
John Adams (1735-1826) does not lack biographies, but this book by a fellow lawyer delivers provocative insights and makes clear why he remains our least charismatic Founding Father.
Lacking Washington’s gravitas or Jefferson’s or Madison’s political acumen, Adams excelled as a prosecutor—pointing out British offenses against American rights in the 1774-1777 Continental Congress—and as a constitutional scholar. Bernstein agrees with historians that his major contribution to the republic was the American system of government. Unlike Jefferson and Paine, who claimed that whatever government the common people chose would be perfect, Adams insisted that humans were selfish, competitive, and envious. His solution was our present balance-of-power structure of executive-legislative-judiciary. His career may have peaked during the Continental Congress, where he led the fight for independence. Jefferson later called Adams “our Colossus on the floor.” Sent to France in 1778, he irritated its government by pushing American interests more aggressively than the far more agreeable Benjamin Franklin. They didn’t get along; indeed, it seems that not getting along with people was an Adams specialty. He spent an unhappy eight years as vice president, an unexpectedly powerless office, and “narrowly” won the 1796 presidential election. Entering office in 1797, Adams kept Washington’s cabinet almost intact. A mediocre group, they preferred Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton to the new president. On some issues, they publicly disagreed with Adams and worked against his policies. Equally disloyal, Vice President Jefferson spent his term campaigning for the 1800 election. Adams left office bitter and unpopular. It is only in the last 50 years that scholars have agreed that his political ideas reveal more insights into the real world than competing Founding Fathers. David McCullough’s bestselling 2001 biography smooths out many rough edges that Bernstein does not ignore in this more balanced rehabilitation.
A thoughtful account of John Adams’ ideas and life, warts and all.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-974023-9
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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