JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile
Jacques Roy’s fine narration of Brown’s excellent biography of historian Henry Adams is commendable on every scale, a model of pacing, expression, and tone. It’s no fault of the biographer or narrator that Adams turns out to be not as attractive a personality as his reputation in American letters would have led you to expect. Grandson of one American president and great-grandson of another, his is the last stage in a family saga that spans a century and a half of America’s most formative years. He’s the one who wrote history, rather than made it. Together, biographer and narrator make fascinating a man who was, in life, a constricted, bigoted, and, in many ways, unsympathetic figure. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 09/14/2020
Historian Brown (Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald) delivers a splendid biography of Harvard professor and memoirist Henry Adams (1838–1918). The direct descendant of two presidents and a diplomat, Adams, who is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, sardonically referred to himself as a “failure.” Yet he managed to emerge from his prominent family’s shadow and make a worthy and memorable life for himself, Brown reveals. He vividly describes Adams’s milieu during a period of sweeping social change in America, detailing his marriage to socialite and photographer Marian “Clover” Hooper, who committed suicide in 1885; his friendships with Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Henry Cabot Lodge; and his travels in Cuba, Japan, Russia, and the South Pacific. Brown also tracks how Adams’s views on the Civil War shifted during his tenure as his father’s personal secretary in London, and notes his stances against the spoils system, the gold standard, and imperialism, as well as his ethnic and racial prejudices. The fully fleshed-out Adams that emerges in these pages is irascible, self-contradictory, and always fascinating. Readers will be thrilled by this standout portrait of the man and his era. Agent: Chris Calhoun, Chris Calhoun Agency (Nov.)
From the Publisher
Marvelous...provides a compelling account of America’s transformation in the space of one man’s lifetime, from a Republic where the Adams name meant everything, to an industrialized behemoth that had left him behind.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Thoroughly researched and gracefully written...[Henry Adams] was more comfortable on the sidelines than he ever would have been in the arena. And, as Mr. Brown reveals, Adams was a brilliant observer.” —The Wall Street Journal
“The book proceeds less day by day than idea by idea, theme by theme, and this approach works particularly well.” —Boston Globe
“I vicariously enjoyed the varied life of Henry Adams, America's greatest memoirist.” —Ed Glaeser, The Wall Street Journal's “Books of the Year”
“Well-written and enthralling . . . [Brown] makes the case for Henry as the most interesting of the Adamses.” —Chronicle
“[Brown’s] excellent biography of this flawed but fascinating thinker, descended from two U.S. presidents, illuminates an extraordinary life and the period of great change it spanned.” —The Christian Science Monitor, Best Books of November
“David Brown’s fine [The Last American Aristocrat] is the latest to grapple with Adams’s paradoxes and limitations.” —Jonathan Parry, London Review of Books
“The fully fleshed-out Adams that emerges in these pages is irascible, self-contradictory, and always fascinating. Readers will be thrilled by this standout portrait of the man and his era.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A fresh, top-notch biography . . . A splendid addition to the shelf of books about a distinctive, ever elusive figure in American history.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Brown, who expertly places Adams in the context of his time, shows how Adams shaped his distinctively detached and ironic point of view. He tracks Adams’ developing conviction that industrial modernism would cause the decay of western civilization and deconstructs Adams’ nineteenth-century attitudes.” —Booklist
“What a wonderful book! With graceful but urgent prose, David Brown holds Adams to account, asking hard questions about his life and work with empathy and deep insight. Here is Henry Adams in the round: a long American life filled with achievement and failure, pleasures and sorrows. This beautifully constructed narrative manages to be both timeless and timely all at once.” —Natalie Dykstra, author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life
“For general readers and scholars alike, The Last American Aristocrat will be the defining biography of Henry Adams for many years to come.” —William Merrill Decker, author of The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams
“The Last American Aristocrat is a merciless, searing—and yet touching and sympathetic—biography of a brilliant man who rarely mustered sympathy for others. Henry Adams was convinced that he was living at the end of the world that produced him, and with finesse and skill David Brown makes him a flawed but revealing subject who resonates with our times. A fascinating book.” —Richard White, professor emeritus of American history, Stanford University, and author of The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896
“One of the most important critics of industrial capitalism and American modernity gets his due (warts and all) from a superbly talented historian. David Brown has written a terrific book about the fascinating character of Henry Adams. He not only gets at the heart of Adams’s rich ideas but also the context in which they emerged, making the book a great work of American history and a great biography too. Just as important, The Last American Aristocrat is beautifully written and a fun read.” —Kevin Mattson, author of We’re Not Here to Entertain and Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University
“As a historian, David Brown not only gives us a meticulously researched and accessible account of Henry Adams’s long and remarkable life and career, he also skillfully provides a detailed and illuminating picture of the social, political, and cultural context of Adams’s times. Brown is clear-eyed and thought-provoking in depicting Adams as uneasily and often precariously poised between the colonial past of his illustrious forebears and the industrialized and modernist present through which he lived.” —Jackson R. Bryer, professor emeritus of English, University of Maryland, and president, F. Scott Fitzgerald Society
Library Journal
★ 10/01/2020
Three years before his death, historian, writer, and frequent traveler Henry Adams (1838–1918) observed, "I've outlived at least three quite distinct worlds since 1838." In this masterful biography, Brown (history, Elizabethtown Coll.; Paradise Lost) appreciates Adams's strengths and understands—and explains—his shortcomings. Two of Adams's ancestors served as U.S. president and his father served as ambassador to the UK in the turbulent days of the American Civil War. By Henry's time, though, his family's influence in national politics had waned, nor was Henry suited to political life. The author successfully shows how Adams's life and experiences were influenced by a newly industrialized and democratized nation. His writing apprenticeship began early; as a teenager, he helped his father edit the ten-volume Works of John Adams. Brown effectively shows how his subject's views evolved over time, from writing the award-winning The Education of Henry Adams (1918) to working as a journalist in Washington, DC to holding a professorship at Harvard. Yet, he doesn't shy away from dark times, such as the travels after the death of his wife. VERDICT This is a model of critical biography that will be appreciated by all lovers of history or biography.—David Keymer, Cleveland
JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile
Jacques Roy’s fine narration of Brown’s excellent biography of historian Henry Adams is commendable on every scale, a model of pacing, expression, and tone. It’s no fault of the biographer or narrator that Adams turns out to be not as attractive a personality as his reputation in American letters would have led you to expect. Grandson of one American president and great-grandson of another, his is the last stage in a family saga that spans a century and a half of America’s most formative years. He’s the one who wrote history, rather than made it. Together, biographer and narrator make fascinating a man who was, in life, a constricted, bigoted, and, in many ways, unsympathetic figure. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-07-22
A fresh, top-notch biography of Henry Adams (1838-1918).
Noted historian Brown once again trains his perceptive eye on a major American thinker. As a member of a powerful political family, Adams possessed the strengths and prejudices of his class, and his work both chronicled and reflected the decline of the Boston-centered gentry. Elevating self-pity—what Brown calls his “sense of displacement”—into a unique sensibility and generalizing from it, Adams made irony into a distinctive, signature style. His principal historical works—those about the Jefferson and Madison administrations and Gothic culture—are unrivaled masterpieces. Yet despite a backward-looking mind, Brown notes that Adams also evinced traits of a modern man who, despite his often suffocating emotionlessness, responded to new experiences and historical developments with an open mind—but always critically. Unfortunately, like most members of his class and circle, he was also deeply anti-Semitic, ethnocentric, anti-labor, and racist. “I believe,” writes Brown, “that to understand much of America’s history, and more specifically its movement in the late nineteenth century toward an imperial, industrial identity, one both increasingly beholden to technology and concerned with the fate of the white race, is to understand Henry Adams.” The author presents his “critical profile” of Adams, a man of “fluidity of identity,” with the acuity that marks his earlier works. Few write so confidently of the American historical writings produced by both academic and freelance writers. When Brown leaves American precincts, as he must to write about Adams’ late-life masterpiece, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he is less sure-footed, but that weakness only modestly mars the book’s many strengths. It takes up easy company with related works on Adams by Ernest Samuels, Garry Wills, and Edward Chalfant. In deftly capturing a man of enormous scholarly achievement, near-tragic limitations, and symbolic significance in American history, Brown gives us another fine biographical study.
A splendid addition to the shelf of books about a distinctive, ever elusive figure in American history.
