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A review by idratherbereading542
John Adams by David McCullough
4.0
John Adams is the first biography I've read and at over 600 pages (not including Acknowledgements and Credits) it was a bit of an ambitious choice for jumping into the genre with.
But despite taking me quite awhile to finish, I really enjoyed this. For me, it's a really different reading experience than fiction because it wasn't the type of book I'd pick up when I wanted to escape life, but whenever I did pick it up I felt like I learned a little bit each time.
Quite honestly before picking up this book I didn't know a whole lot about John Adams. In fact, I didn't know much about any of the founding fathers and/or former Presidents.
But I picked this book up because our country (the US) is changing a lot right now and, without getting into a political discussion, it can be argued that we might be on the brink of war. I know, it's debatable. But there's no question that there's a lot of tension going on in America. So I picked this book up because I want to know more about our country's history and what people went through during other times when the country was greatly changing. So this is the first of, I hope, many more books that I'll read on US history. Because history has a way of repeating itself, right?
This book definitely opened my eyes to all the great things that John Adams did. Like I said above, I don't have any experience reading biographies so I don't have much to compare it to. But I think McCullough did a very thorough job at portraying the life of John Adams. At times it did feel like it was written probably a little bit biased towards liking Adams rather than not, but he did still threw in some opposing views of how people saw Adams. I can't speak to the accuracy since this is my first look into John Adams' life, but it felt well-researched to me.
While definitely thorough, it was certainly long! For the most part though everything included did help to form a larger picture of Adams and what kind of person he was. Despite his shortcomings -- mainly being a bit socially awkward and therefore pissing people off with the things he says -- I grew to have a real liking towards him. Overall he just seems like a really good person who was at time misunderstood by those who didn't understand his die-hard patriotic views.
Overall I enjoyed this and I'm glad I stepped out of my box to read it. When I'm feeling a little more ambitious (since all of his books are long) I'll definitely read more by McCullough, but for now I'll probably venture into reading biographies and books on the American revolution that are a little bit shorter from other authors. :)
But despite taking me quite awhile to finish, I really enjoyed this. For me, it's a really different reading experience than fiction because it wasn't the type of book I'd pick up when I wanted to escape life, but whenever I did pick it up I felt like I learned a little bit each time.
Quite honestly before picking up this book I didn't know a whole lot about John Adams. In fact, I didn't know much about any of the founding fathers and/or former Presidents.
But I picked this book up because our country (the US) is changing a lot right now and, without getting into a political discussion, it can be argued that we might be on the brink of war. I know, it's debatable. But there's no question that there's a lot of tension going on in America. So I picked this book up because I want to know more about our country's history and what people went through during other times when the country was greatly changing. So this is the first of, I hope, many more books that I'll read on US history. Because history has a way of repeating itself, right?
This book definitely opened my eyes to all the great things that John Adams did. Like I said above, I don't have any experience reading biographies so I don't have much to compare it to. But I think McCullough did a very thorough job at portraying the life of John Adams. At times it did feel like it was written probably a little bit biased towards liking Adams rather than not, but he did still threw in some opposing views of how people saw Adams. I can't speak to the accuracy since this is my first look into John Adams' life, but it felt well-researched to me.
While definitely thorough, it was certainly long! For the most part though everything included did help to form a larger picture of Adams and what kind of person he was. Despite his shortcomings -- mainly being a bit socially awkward and therefore pissing people off with the things he says -- I grew to have a real liking towards him. Overall he just seems like a really good person who was at time misunderstood by those who didn't understand his die-hard patriotic views.
Overall I enjoyed this and I'm glad I stepped out of my box to read it. When I'm feeling a little more ambitious (since all of his books are long) I'll definitely read more by McCullough, but for now I'll probably venture into reading biographies and books on the American revolution that are a little bit shorter from other authors. :)