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JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

Name: JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Author: Harlow Giles Unger
ISBN: 978-0-306-82129-5

A LIFE

by Harlow Giles Unger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2012

A fine examination of a life, well deserving a place alongside David McCullough’s study of Adams père.

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A neglected president receives his due as a statesman and practical politician.

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), writes Unger (American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution, 2011, etc.), bridged the years between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He ate with Charles Dickens, ended the War of 1812, shaped the ever-so-slightly misnamed Monroe Doctrine, taught at Harvard, and was one of the most prominent abolitionist leaders in the years preceding the Civil War. On top of that, his father was the nation’s second president. So why is he not better known? The short answer is that he didn’t trumpet his own accomplishments. The longer answer is that American history is so badly taught these days that it seems surprising that anyone remembers Washington, much less Millard Fillmore. Unger’s bracing, readable text is a remedy. In the early chapters, the author explores the difficult job of being first son to the Massachusetts first family. In one telling anecdote, John Adams demanded that the boy be admitted to Harvard as a junior or senior, given “his mastery of two classical and three modern languages, and his command of an enormous body of classical and modern literature, philosophy, and science.” The doting aside, Adams fils soon cut a political figure all his own, deftly serving as a diplomat and analyst of what today we would call geopolitics. His fruitful term as ambassador to the court of the tsar even led his compatriots in Washington to call him an alien, “especially after John Quincy began walking in the winter weather wearing his exotic Russian fur hat and great coat.” Unger writes appreciatively of Adams’ considerable accomplishments, even if the voters of the president’s own time were less generous, turning him out of office in favor of the restive war hero Andrew Jackson.

A fine examination of a life, well deserving a place alongside David McCullough’s study of Adams père.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-306-82129-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Da Capo

Review Posted Online: April 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
THOMAS PAINE AND THE CLARION CALL FOR AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
by Harlow Giles Unger

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRST FOUNDING FATHER
by Harlow Giles Unger

- BOOK REVIEW
HENRY CLAY
by Harlow Giles Unger

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.