Brookhiser on the Adamses 3/15/2015

 [ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/13/2025] 

A long gap between my last entry and today. Time spent on Richard Wright's Native Son and getting my first EKG and watching TV and trying to be in the Lenten spirit. Five days ago I finished Richard Brookhiser's America's First Dynasty: The Adamses 1735-1918 (Free Press, 2002).

 

I was not greatly impressed - and I expected something impressive. I recall positive reviews of Brookhiser's Alexander Hamilton biography. However, I thought it did fill in the blank's of Henry Adams' Education of Henry Adams, and it did well on John Quincy Adams, but the end seemed flat, somewhat incomplete. There was no original research - if reading already collected letters and diaries and memoirs does not qualify as original research. There were some strange assertions of facts (who decided President James Buchanan was gay and when was this decided?). I know my wits are getting dimmer, but I cannot tell you the book's theme. I am not even certain if all descendants of John Adams became extinct as of 1918 or if the date was chosen for the death of Henry Adams.

 But what gave me the greatest disappointment concerns John Adams - albeit not an entirely unexpected oversight. Brookhiser mentions John writing the Massachusetts constitution without addressing that document's importance to the federal constitution, or the constitutions of the states. Just another indication of our mindset of American constitutions meaning only the federal constitution.

Perhaps more interest as a companion to David McCullough's John Adams, or as a brief overview of John Quincy Adams, or Charles Adams, or Henry Adams. 

 

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