Customer Reviews

Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
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Four generations of the John Adams family of Quincy are brilliantly covered in this detailed, yet concise, 400 page study. The lives and work of 2 presidents, 3 major diplomats, cabinet officials, and great scholars are outlined within the context of their remarkable history as an American family. This book touches upon the topics of Colonial America through the Revolution and Civil War on into the 20th Century. One can't help but be interested with such personalities as Adamses John, Abigail, John Quincy, Charles Frances, Henry, and Brooks. Their triumph as a family, depite problems financial and personal (alchoholism, depression, etc.), makes for inspirational reading.

(...) An insightful and interesting study of four generations of complex and often contradictory personalities. I especially appreciated the author's manner of hinting at future developments and bating the reader to read on and on...in my case, well into the night. His analysis of the Adams' strengths and weaknesses is what sets this book apart so I am perplexed that anyone would describe it as dull and a mere listing of events. But don't take my word for it -- if you have only a few moments to browse through it, check the index for the passage dealing with the death of the tragic first generation daughter, Nabby. The writing is poignant and wrenching. Anything but routine.

I read this book in about one week. I found it very well written with logical conclusions and theories based on an extensive primary and secondary source material study, complex yet readable and extremely well researched. This is a book that anyone interested in American history and the complexities of the first 4 generations of the Adams family will appreciate. A masterful undertaking by the author...never boring and highly informative.

I've never been that interested in the Adamses, preferring Southern history instead, and I now see how my superficial knowledge of them could not have been more wrong. The Puritan killjoys who got up with the sun, worked hard all day with nary a murmur, served their country like all good patriots, and raised up some sort of righteous Presbyterian family was nowhere to be found. Instead there were kids who would do anything to get out of work, kids who hated school and were kicked out, drunkeness, suicide, mental illness, desperately terrible marriages... It reads like a telenovela.

The beauty of Descent from Glory is that the people who made up the Adams family, from the infamous John and Abigail to the barely remembered Henry and "Sister Lou," come alive in the letters and papers they left behind, and I think Paul Nagel stitches them together masterfully. I am so tired of history lite! What good is it to know the dates and places of people if you don't know anything about THEM as people who lived and breathed?

For example, I was looking up Henry Adams the other day. He was a grandson of JQA. I found a black and white photo of a balding middle-aged man with the beard fellows of the late 19th century fancied. A dull photo, really of what I might have imagined to be a dull man. But ah! Henry Adams was, in the words of his tragic wife Clover, "beyond all words, tenderer and better than all of you even." As a young boy his mother wrote to Charles Francis Adams, his father, "Henry is Henry, when in the house mostly curled up in your big chair with a book and good natured, of course." As a young man in search of an independent life away from the burden of being 'An Adams', he wrote his father, "I am actually becoming afraid to look at the future, and feel only utterly weak about it." I look at that old photo differently now.

I also used to wonder why people in the 18th and 19th c. burned letters and journals when a loved one died, especially since I live in a time when people will put a photo of themselves on the toilet if it gets them 2 seconds of attention. Having seen how frank and open people were in their letters and journals, I understand the desire to blot out the darker sides and moments of their lives. I am very glad that this was not a universal practice as it would be a terrible loss to the world if the secret thoughts of people who have gone before us were obliterated forever.