... a lucid and compelling work that should do for Adams's reputation what Mr. McCullough's 1992 book, Truman, did for Harry S. Truman ... Writing in a fluent narrative style that combines a novelist's sense of drama with a scholar's meticulous attention to the historical record, Mr. McCullough gives the reader a palpable sense of the many perils attending the birth of the American nation and the heated, often acrimonious politics of the day ... What comes across most insistently in this absorbing book is a sense of Adams's exuberant, conflicted and thoroughly engaging personality.

Research and analysis are woven into a seamless narrative that makes it an absolute joy to read ... While acknowledging his flaws, McCullough clearly likes and admires his subject and writes of him with great warmth and affection.

... [a] masterpiece of biography ... a wonderfully stirring biography; to read it is to feel as if you are witnessing the birth of a country firsthand.

This big but extremely readable book is by far the best biography of Adams ever written. It may do for Adams’s reputation what McCullough’s last biography did for Truman’s. This much underappreciated Founder would be pleased. He never expected posterity to honor him or erect a monument in his memory. It is about time that we did ... these are the public events in the career of this extraordinary American, and McCullough takes us through them in graceful and readable prose ... McCullough’s focus remains always on Adams and his personal relationships...Consequently, he does not engage in any academic debates with historians about their views of Adams...he does not analyze in any depth Adams’s very formidable theories about government and politics and the changes they underwent during the course of his career ... Because McCullough writes from Adams’s point of view, he occasionally takes Adams’s word for events that were sometimes questionable ... That McCullough can make us care about this couple as if they were our intimate friends is a measure of his achievement. Indeed, his special gift as an artist is his ability to recreate past human beings in all their fullness and all their humanity. In John and Abigail Adams be has found characters worthy of his talent.

David McCullough superbly captures the life and times of this remarkable figure in his compelling new book ... McCullough skillfully interweaves accounts of his subject's private and public lives ... This exceptional biography should be enjoyed by anyone who wants to explore in some detail the complexity of the Revolutionary and Early American eras as experienced by one who was a crucial mover and shaker.

McCullough's reckoning all but ignores the irascibility that undermined Adams's reputation among his contemporaries...The result is an admirable but curiously flat John Adams ... John Adams doubted that historians would ever record the history of the Revolution accurately. Now, 175 years after his death, we can at last give Adams the esteem he deserves. It remains true nonetheless that the wonderfully congenial subject of McCullough's carefully researched, lovingly written biography is more consistently companionable, and also less interesting, than John Adams was in his own time.

... a prudent but deeply admiring study of an enormously talented and remarkable patriot who was also one of the most suspicious, pugnacious, and at times pig-headed conservatives of the early American republic. In conveying so much about Adams’s goodness, in vivid and smooth prose, McCullough slights Adams’s intellectual ambitions, his brilliance and his ponderousness...McCullough scants, in other words, everything that went into rendering Adams the paradox that he was: a great American who would prove virtually irrelevant to his nation’s subsequent political development. And in its very smoothness and vividness, McCullough’s life of Adams is useful also in another way. It gives a measure of the current condition of popular history in America, in its strengths but also--rather grievously--in its weaknesses ... McCullough barely mentions Adams’s political writings; and what he has to say about the two major works consists of brief quotations surrounded by utterly conventional plot summary and commentary ... McCullough’s approach still falls flat as a historical method. For finally men such as Jefferson and Adams need to be judged not for who they were but for what they thought and what they did ... The result is a biography that fails to ask many difficult questions about its subject, and thereby makes him less interesting than he actually was.

While McCullough never misses an episode in Adams's long and often troubled life, he includes enough biographical material on Jefferson that this can be considered two biographies for the price of one—which explains some of its portliness ... Despite the whopping length, there's not a wasted word in this superb, swiftly moving narrative, which brings new and overdue honor to a Founding Father.

Here a preeminent master of narrative history takes on the most fascinating of our founders to create a benchmark for all Adams biographers. With a keen eye for telling detail and a master storyteller's instinct for human interest, McCullough resurrects the great Federalist, revealing in particular his restrained, sometimes off-putting disposition, as well as his political guile. The events McCullough recounts are well-known, but with his astute marshaling of facts, the author surpasses previous biographers ... The author is likewise brilliant in portraying Adams's complex relationship with Jefferson.