#2

John Adams - David McCullough
The 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize (Biography) and frequent inhabitant of the New York Times 10 best list for that year it may be redundant to say this is indeed a very good book. McCullough has managed to distance himself from the spate of historians who have admitted to a significant amount of plagiarism - and thus established himself as the pre-eminent modern "popular" historian. The story is (as he told it to Terry Gross among others), he initially set out to write a book on Jefferson, but found that the man wrote little of his personal life and had few surviving correspondences with any of his contemporaries. In contrast John Adams wrote almost daily to his wife and several friends, thus making him a very apt subject for a work of this depth. McCullough has written several other large works on events, people, and objects that have shaped the American experience (no reference to the PBS series intended) ; The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge (on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge), and several other weighty works. This book is by no means short, but is a very engaging and easy read and well worth the time. He also has a great voice, as the narrator of the Ken Burns' epic Civil War documentary, as well as Tara's Ph.D. graduation speaker at Dartmouth (who beat Cornell in hockey this weekend, yes!).
Rating: A
Related: (any other work by the same author - for stylistic purposes)