RaveThe New CriterionThough the two men were thus joined in the public’s memory, they could not have been more different in their personalities, in their private lives, in their political outlooks, and in their contributions to the new order—a theme artfully developed by Gordon S. Wood in Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson... It would not be an exaggeration to say that Gordon Wood has written better and more extensively than anyone about the events and leading figures in that formative period of U.S. history ...nicely crafted in Professor Wood’s usual style, does not add anything substantially new about the two men or about their relationship with one another, nor does it challenge the conventional interpretation of the relative importance of Jefferson and Adams in subsequent debates...does succeed in adding a great deal of depth and detail to the relationship between Jefferson and Adams.
