My Self-Imposed Reading List

I have begun a tear through biographies of the Founding Fathers. Some I have read already, some are new.

Last year, I read David McCullough’s stupendous achievement, John Adams.

But after Presidents Day, I made up a list – and have been racing on through it.

— I read a biography of Alexander Hamilton.

— I re-read the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams. Never fails to take my breath away.

— I read a biography of Thomas Jefferson (I know – there are so many out there – but I wanted a standard one – not a “let’s re-open the case of Thomas Jefferson” blah blah. I wanted your basic biography without any axes to grind. I found one. Finished that last week.)

— This week, I started a biography of Ben Franklin. It is called The First American. He is blowing me away. How he basically tripped over the discovery of wind-surfing, at, like, the age of 13, because he didn’t want to stop flying his kite while he was swimming. He wanted to be able to do BOTH activities, simultaneously. Right now, he just moved to London for the first time, in the 1720s, on the false promises of some lying governor, who told him he would set him up as a printer in London … It all turned out to be a lie, the governor had no connections in London – but of course Ben Franklin, after struggling a bit, landed on his feet. But now he’s heading back to Philadelphia. I’ll probably talk more about what I’m learning in this biography at a later date.

After Ben?

I need to “do” George Washington.

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9 Responses to My Self-Imposed Reading List

  1. Dan says:

    Joseph Ellis wrote a book titled ‘Founding Brothers.’ It’s a collection of essays really, about various Found Fathers (Hamilton, Adams, Washington, Jefferson); I highly recommend it.

  2. red says:

    Ooooh. Sounds perfect.

  3. DBW says:

    “I need to ‘do’ George Washington.”

    I doubt Martha will go for that.

  4. homebru says:

    What was the Thomas Jefferson book that you settled on? Or are you not recommending it to others?

  5. red says:

    Homebru:

    Willard Sterne Randall wrote the biography I read. He was also the one who wrote the bio of Alexander Hamilton – and I really liked his style. So I went with his bio of Jefferson.

    I liked it a lot. He de-bunks a lot of the Jefferson myths, decimating them in a couple paragraphs. And he leaves a lot of the character of Jefferson, (complex, incomprehensible, contradictory) a mystery. He understands that we can’t actually know him. All we can do is study what he DID, and what he WROTE.

    I highly recommend it. And the biography he wrote of Hamilton was also amazing.

  6. CW says:

    I envy David McCullough. I wish I had time to write 15-lb history books. I guess if I was as good a writer and historian as Mr. McCullough, maybe I would :)

  7. red says:

    McCullough is incredible. I have seen him interviewed numerous times, and I love his personality. He really seems to imagine himself into the world of those he writes about. He wants to read what they read, see what they saw, really feel what it was like to be them.

    I remember him being interviewed on Book TV, and he was talking about Nabby Adams, John Adams’ beloved daughter – who had one of her breasts removed without anesthesia, because of a tumor. She, of course, died soon afterwards, but I so remember McCullough saying, “Her agony must have been beyond anything I can imagine.”

    I don’t know – I was very moved by that.

  8. red says:

    Oh, and I envy McCullough too. :)

  9. red says:

    Martha will just have to deal.

    By the way – any of you readers out there: any recommendations for biographies of good ol’ George? There’s a new one out called George Washington and his Slaves, but that is just the kind of biography-with-an-axe-to-grind that I do not want.

    Is there a classic biography of Washington?

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