Where Those Pulitzer People Make a Solid Point

John Adams by David McCullough
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Everyone knows, but I'll say it anyway--this is an excellent biography and deserves the reputation it has earned. The research is exhaustive, the biographer's control of the material is excellent, and the book is satisfyingly complete. This is well worth reading.

Having said that, I didn't love every page. There were times I put it away and didn't start again for weeks. TBH, I was not terribly interested in John Adams before reading this (or before watching the mini-series way back when) but I decided I wanted to read it and pushed myself to keep rolling. Some of it required focus and concerted effort; when those were lacking, I took a break.

Still, big chunks of it were entertaining. I realized near the end that I read it with most pleasure whenever the book dealt with Adams' private life, his travels, his friendships, and his family. It's a story with action and reversals and unexpected wins. The politics, though, which comprise half the book, I found much less engaging. Not the author's fault; he did what he was supposed to. Entertaining the reader is only one job here. More important is the information he is providing, including the organizing of that information and the presentation of all of it, condensing it into a meaningful narrative, and since that job is handled so well there's no way to give less than 5 stars to this book.

(I rate genre fiction almost exclusively on whether or not I enjoyed it, whether it was fun to pick up and read, and how fun it was, exactly. Some might argue that that is too narrow an approach even for fiction, and I would argue shut up. But I would agree that it definitely would be a poor measure for non-fiction, as it has different purposes, and that's why I don't follow my usual rule here.)

The last chapter is very touching, and though the author does not play it up unduly it is hard to read that bit without feeling almost a personal loss. The death of Abigail Adams, after such a long, close marriage, where both of them relied on each other so much, felt like the saddest thing that could happen to either. But then, soon after in the narrative (though it is some years later in real life), we reach the passing of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The fact that their deaths came on the same day--the 50th anniversary of the signing of the declaration, a correspondence almost too perfect to be true--was so poignant that no reader could leave feeling untouched. Reading the account of the nearly simultaneous passing of two titanic figures, friends who became enemies and then friends again, left me choked up, 200 years after the fact.

I guess biography always strikes me this way, at least to a degree; it's always bittersweet to see the whole of a person's life laid out like a scroll, especially when you come to the end and can see how it has always been leading toward that final moment. It makes no difference, somehow, to know all along that the end was coming. That's the art of the author, I guess.

This is a book well worth reading if one is inclined. If it was not always a pleasure to read, it often was, and I understand many aspects of our history far better than I did before. A fair trade.

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