... [a] thoroughly researched and gracefully written biography ... or Mr. Brown, Adams’s Education is a wonderful source. Its prose is carefully tooled and provides him with epigram after epigram. For Adams’s early years, it is irreplaceable. Mr. Brown’s challenge is to keep Adams’s self-chronicling from taking over the show. With rare exceptions, he does so most ably. And even when Adams runs on, his gift for words makes the lapse forgivable. In fact, sometimes Mr. Brown could allow Adams more running room. He summarizes many of Adams’s articles on politics and other subjects, and for the most part the summaries are judicious and laudably brief. But now and then the reader wants more ... [Adams's memoir] still bears reading. Modern readers will miss a reference or two, although Mr. Brown’s book can help as a guide.

The Last American Aristocrat a marvelous new biography by David S. Brown, reveals how dynastic burden shaped the personality and career of the brilliant, bitter and thoroughly unlikable man who brought the prominence of the Adams family, and expectations for the endurance of political legacies, to an ignominious end. In the process it 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 ... It’s a tribute to Brown’s talent as a biographer that he enables the reader to feel empathy for a man who expressed so little for anyone else.

The title The Education of Henry Adams recalls novels like The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. But its structure reverses the classic formula of a charismatic nobody rewarded, in a final turn, with his rightful wealth and pedigree. 'Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he,' Adams writes of himself. Just like that, one very useful narrative structure, that of adversity overcome, is ruled out. Instead, Adams tells the story of failing up: he notes, with each unearned success, the bankruptcy of the very distinction between winning and losing ... The pace of the book in its early chapters implies an even distribution of these life incidents across its length, as in a conventional autobiography. But The Education is not conventional, and not even quite an autobiography. Adams usually refers to himself in the third person, adding a grand study of failure to the library of volumes written about his family’s legendary statesmen. Adams saw himself as a passenger in his life, riding his own name ... And so we have, in his book, the eerie double exposure of a person from the distant past almost stepping on our toes as he describes the technological future. 'After so many years of effort to find one’s drift,' Adams writes, 'the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with a steady progress oceanwards.' When I read the last chapters of the book, I always think of another great work that ends with a delegate of historical time gazing at his own obsolescence: Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Henry Adams, who considered himself 'a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,' who washed ashore in the twentieth, knew that he’d glimpsed our world.

... the country’s first family will always be the Adamses ... But one of the many useful reminders in David S. Brown’s new biography...is that this particular dynasty ended not with a bang or even a whimper but something far stranger: It ended with a writer ... The book proceeds less day by day than idea by idea, theme by theme, and this approach works particularly well with Adams’s flaws. There’s his well-known anti-Semitism, of course, but also his views on race. Brown’s brisk asides on the Free-Soil movement and the stubborn persistence of slavery in the North make it easier to evaluate Adams’s early writings during the Civil War ... a vital guide to understanding the before, the after, and the messy, never-quite-completed change.

Brown doesn’t seem to be selling much other than that you, the reader, might be interested in this Henry Adams fellow. This reviewer found that position refreshing ... The temptation to ironize a figure like Adams, irascible, self-mythologizing, given both to his own ironization and to ugly blurts that call for retorts, must have been overwhelming for Brown, indeed for any modern who spends much time with the old man, and he admirably resists the urge to overdo it ... Brown’s work shines brightest in illuminating Adams’s world, as opposed to attempting to transpose him into ours. Brown is a deft navigator of Adams’s voluminous correspondence and has an acute and economical way with characterizations of the many characters in his subject’s life ... The author describes the political situations in which Adams found himself...in ways that break little new ground but that convey the complexities involved, and the ways in which personalities impacted situations in this era of elite politics, with notable aplomb. Readers who enjoy biography as a form will greatly enjoy The Last American Aristocrat irrespective of any previous investment in Henry Adams. He had an interesting life, and Brown captures it well.

Brown reads...almost everything [on Adams]—and he has an excellent command of Adams’s writing, from polemical essays to casual letters—through this prism ... Adams had a tendency to sneer at modernity and the masses, but Brown’s sneering at Adams’s sneering can get tiresome. Banking interests were, and are, often corrupt, and pointing this out doesn’t necessarily indicate class aggrievement. Brown rightly castigates Adams’s regular use of anti-Semitic tropes when talking about out-of-control finance capitalism; he just as rightly points to Adams’s wary response to Reconstruction. Adams was more than just a fading aristocrat cursing against the dying day, though. Too often Brown misses this. There's an even bigger blind spot in The Last American Aristocrat: we don’t get much sense for Adams as a prose stylist. Brown, like many, compares Adams to Edward Gibbon. But this comparison works not because of methodological similarity or philosophical affinity. It works because of shared writerly brilliance.

Brown ends up delivering what he proposes: a deep history of American as lived through one man, a man born into Boston’s privileged elite, part of a family at the nexus of U.S. politics and culture ... Brown makes Adams feel like a contemporary ... By writing so thoroughly about Adams’ intellectual development, the reader is shown assumptions and beliefs that still run deeply through American culture. This is history at its finest, proving clearly how the past is very much part of the present. We just have to know where to look.

In this masterful biography, Brown...appreciates Adams’s strengths and understands—and explains—his shortcomings ... Brown effectively shows how his subject’s views evolved over time ... Yet, he doesn’t shy away from dark times, such as the travels after the death of his wife ... This is a model of critical biography that will be appreciated by all lovers of history or biography.

Brown, who expertly places Adams in the context of his time, shows how Adams shaped his distinctively detached and ironic point of view ... Brown calls his book a 'critical profile' and is less interested in Adams’ personal life, his relationship to his parents, and his marriage to the brilliant and self-destructive Clover Adams than in his intellectual life. The question of why contemporary readers admire Adams’ masterwork is not fully explored. This book should be regarded as a companion to other biographies of a landmark American thinker.

... a splendid biography ... Brown...vividly describes Adams’s milieu during a period of sweeping social change in America ... 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.

A fresh, top-notch biography ... Noted historian Brown once again trains his perceptive eye on a major American thinker ... 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...he is less sure-footed, but that weakness only modestly mars the book’s many strengths ... 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.