John Adams

John Adams by David McCullough, 651 pages

John Adams had long been the forgotten Founder.  Always controversial, never wildly popular, defeated in a landslide in his 1800 Presidential reelection bid, he didn't write the Declaration of Independence, didn't fly a kite in a thunderstorm, didn't chop down a cherry tree.  Intellectuals remembered him as the progenitor of the dynasty that would include his son John Quincy and his great-grandson Henry, and conservatives reimagined him as an American Burke, but it was David McCullough who virtually single-handedly raised the public perception of Adams from a trivia question to his rightful place amongst the Founders.

McCullough writes with novelistic grace.  His focus is on the personalities of his subjects, rather than the interminable business of debate, diplomacy, and government - although this has the drawback of sometimes understating the difficulties and undervaluing the importance of such work.  It is emblematic of his approach that McCullough spends more time on a tour of English gardens undertaken by Jefferson and Adams in 1787 than on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence - the former brilliantly illuminates the characters of these two men and the nature of their highly significant, turbulent relationship, but the latter was obviously far more important as a single historical event, that is, the Declaration was a milestone in American and world history, but the personalities, feuds, and friendships of Jefferson and Adams would shape history in subtler but equally important ways.