In addition to its exploration of Adams's personal and intellectual journey, the book also serves as a meditation on the nature of American identity and the legacy of the nation's founding ideals. Brown grapples with questions of power, privilege, and responsibility, offering readers a nuanced portrait of a man who embodied both the promise and contradictions of the American experience.

I was hoping for much more in this book. I really wanted to understand Henry Adams and that just wasn't the case with this book.

I did not know anything about Henry Adams before I read this book and now I feel I have at least a basic knowledge of him.

This book was definitely a huge historical undertaking. There was a lot of buzz about this book and it is definitely a heavy-hitter in academic circles.

I love history and was going into it with high hopes of a very interesting read, but I found the book to be rather dry. I have so far stopped about 1/3 of the way into the book so bear that in mind when you read this review. It may very well get better later in the book. I am still interested in finishing, but it will probably take me a very long time.

I have definitely learned a lot so far, and for that it gets 4 stars. There are always parallels to our life today that one can glean from a historical book like this one, and that part I am enjoying a lot.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC as a reviewer.

"What could become of such a child of the 17th and 18th centuries when he should wake up to find himself required to play the games on the 20th?"

Henry Adams is the subject of a outstanding biography by David S. Brown. David S. Brown displays Henry Adams the great grandson of the second President of the United States, John Adams and the grandson of the John Quincy Adams who would appoint the young Henry Adams to the Court of St. James. From his vantage point he would look to the United States and see the Civil War raging and hear from the Englishman around him, after the two ironclads took to battle. That the wooden ships of the British Royal Navy are now obsolete.
Henry Adams, unlike his ancestry never sought to run for political office even though he stayed in Washington DC and not venture back to his beloved Boston. Only when he accepted the offer to teach at Harvard and begin a literary publication of which today is still being published. Then he was back in D.C. several years later.
He despised men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and J P Morgan. Saying that those men and others "turned calm into chaos and chaos into profit." Then worried about the Adams trust fund during the gold and silver debacle.
His wife committed suicide and then wrote an eight volume history of the United States of which sales were sluggish of which he stated that those volumes will be gathering dust.
David S Brown has shaking the dust of a person in history whom deserves to be remembered.

Henry Adams was born in 1838, the year the telegraph was first demonstrated. Native Americans were forced to relocate and the Underground Railroad was being established. Meanwhile in Britain, slavery was abolished, Victoria was newly on the throne, and Dickens published Oliver Twist. Adams died in 1918 during WWI, the year of the Spanish Influenza and the first time airplanes were used by the USPS.

Henry was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, 'the Governor' of Henry's childhood, and the great-grandson of founding father President John Adams. His own father Charles Francis had served as ambassador to England, as had generations of Adams men.

Unlike his predecessors, Adams neither committed his life to public service. He never had children and his wife committed suicide when he was in his late 40s. He spent some time teaching at Harvard, and was popular with the students, but it did not suit him.

Henry became a historian, a world traveler, and an insider Washingtonian socialite.

"What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the games of the twentieth? " he wrote in the first chapter, continuing, "As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it."~ from The Education of Henry Adams

It was his book The Education of Henry Adams that introduced me to him. It is a strange book, self-published and shared with his friends. He writes about his childhood in Quincy and his later life, skipping the death of his wife and his most regarded histories. He writes about the changes in society, the rise of capitalists and industry and the power of money.

Like his predecessors, Henry was intellectual, high-minded, and could be contrary. Like his predecessors, he believed one should be called to public duty, not seek it, an 18th c concept dated by his time. Unlike his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he was not called to serve as an ambassador, although he was his father's private secretary in London.

Instead, he wrote. He wrote an eight-volume history of Jeffersonian America, he wrote political commentary, he wrote travel pieces and about architecture and medieval history.

John Adams and John Quincy Adams were men of their time, men of action, called upon to serve their country. Henry was an observer and an outsider, out of sync, never at home.

John Adams was against slavery and John Quincy Adams fought Congress over the ban to discuss abolition. His father Charles Francis was involved with the anti-slavery Whig party. Henry was uninterested and unengaged with the problems of African Americans.

As capitalism and business men rose to power, Anti-Semitism became mainstream, and Henry was not immune. He despaired to see that the big money of the 'northern plutocracy" was the rising power in Washington. He railed against corruption and the patronage system, and despaired that too many 'good men' avoided politics as a dirty business. He railed against the rise of the Boston Irish.

He married a cerebral woman overly attached to her father, a woman liked by few. After her early death, Adams built her a enigmatic memorial, the details of which he left up to the famed sculpture Saint-Gaudens while he went on a world tour while claiming he died to the world with her.

The arc of Adam's life crossed a part of American history and politics I was not well versed on, and I found this aspect of the biography to be very interesting. The problems we see today in American politics have deep roots.

Some trivia tidbits from Adams life:
Henry James wrote in a letter to Edith Wharton that Adams read Jane Austen's Persuasion aloud in the evenings.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's character Thornton Hancock was inspired by Adams; he had met him when a boy.
Adams studied under geologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard, saying his class was "the only teaching that appealed to [my] imagination."
Adams wrote two novels, including Democracy about Gilded Age Washington DC politics; Teddy Roosevelt found it "essentially mean and base."
Adams fell in love with an unhappily married, beautiful and intelligent socialite who counted on his friendship but rejected him as a lover. She did not find him physically attractive.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

An engaging and satisfying biography of Henry Adams, a fascinating and indelibly American character. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having already enjoyed two classics: ‘The Education of Henry Adams’ and Garry Wills’s ‘Henry Adams and the Making of America.” But there is indeed more to say, and to know. Henry Adams deserves another look, and probably several more. Historian David Brown considers Adams’s role as a member of an illustrious political family, an innovative historian, a social critic with a contrarian streak in the late 1800s, and something of a grand Victorian with a complex marriage and a special unrequited love. I liked Brown’s evaluations of Adams’s writings, and his telling of an unusual and memorable life story.

A fascinating and comprehensive look at a man whose life bridged the colonial and modern worlds, a historian whose insight into his times won him a posthumous Pulitizer, and the deeply flawed scion of one of America's leading families. A mandatory addition to any Adams bookshelf.