Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution

by Natalie S. Bober

Overview

Abigail Adams was an extraordinary woman who witnessed the gathering storm of the American Revolution and saw the battle of Bunker Hill from a hilltop near her home. Through her letters to friends and family, Abigail Adams lives in history--and now in this award-winning biography by Natalie Bober. Black & white illustrations .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439115497
Publisher:	Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	05/11/2010
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	869,548
Lexile:	1130L (what's this?)
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Natalie S. Bober is an award-winning biographer and a historian with a long-standing interest in the eighteenth century. She lectures extensively, has taught and served as a consultant on the secondary and college levels, and was part of the Ken Burns film documentary on Thomas Jefferson. Her most recent books include A Restless Spirit: The Story of Robert Frost; Thomas Jefferson: Man on a Mountain; and Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution, winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and the Golden Kite Award of the SCBWI. She resides with her husband in Westchester County, New York, and derives great pleasure from her grandchildren, who happily serve as readers and critics of her books.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 6 Up-This well-researched biography provides an intimate portrait of a unique individual while also reflecting the tenor and times of the 18th century. Long characterized mainly as the wife of one president and the mother of another, Abigail Adams emerges here as an individual rather than an adjunct personality. Drawing from the more than 2000 surviving pieces of her subject's personal correspondence, Bober creates a vehicle to transport readers to a turbulent era in our nation's past. The letters, as she aptly states, ``artlessly mingled the momentous with the mundane.'' Interspersing historically significant characters with family gossip lends an air of vibrancy and a sense of immediacy to dates, names, and events. What is revealed is Adams's deep love for her family, palpable loneliness due to long periods of separation from her husband, and a commitment to achieve more than the goals set for women by the era in which she lived. The author begins with a lengthy chronology that juxtaposes political and personal events, and includes a family tree and local maps. Reference notes and a bibliography indicating manuscript and secondary sources conclude the book. Excellent quality archival reproductions, all of which are clearly labeled, appear throughout. The intelligence, inner strength, and vitality of Abigail Adams emerges with the bold strokes of her pen, admirably reflecting the essence of an age for today's readers.-Joanne Kelleher, Commack Public Library, NY

School Library Journal

Think of this biography as a portrait. Not the smooth, impassive painting reproduced on the jacket, but an intricate mosaic made of colorful bits of fact, emotion, period detail, and letters, letters, letters. Bober nudges readers to look beyond their twentieth-century expectations and become absorbed in another age. She creates a detailed eighteenth-century background showing Adams as the product of her times: an educated, intelligent, and capable woman in an age when the expectations and challenges of a woman's role were different from what they are today, but no less complex. Often separated from her husband John, Abigail wrote letters to him and to others constantly. Throughout the text, Abigail's voice is heard through quotations from her letters. Thorough research of this first-person resource gives Bober a comfortable familiarity with Abigail's personality as well as her personal history, which is interwoven with the turbulent history of her times. As in Bober's "Thomas Jefferson: Man on a Mountain" (1988), meticulous research and documentation give the book authority, good writing gives it clarity, and sympathetic understanding gives it humanity. An excellent biography.

Carolyn Phelan