Joseph J. Ellis writes biographies that I love reading. His ability to both make the men he writes about feel relevant to the modern age and to analyze both their legacy and character is, to me, remarkable. He brings these men out of history, and turns them from marble to flesh. It is fitting, th...
Joseph Ellis' "His Excellency: George Washington" is a well done brief biography of George Washington. Washington, surely, could be the subject of one of those massive bios, such as Chernow's "Alexander Hamilton" or "Titan" or Nasaw's "Andrew Carnegie" or Cannadine's "Mellon." On the other hand, ...
What an exciting book! Ellis conducts you right into the political chaos of the early republic, when the revolutionary fraternity was splintering in feuds, faction and duels (which are preferable to purges, terrors, and nights of long knives): The very idea of a legitimate opposition did not yet ...
I can't say that I understand some of the negative reviews about this book here on this site. If Ellis had been calling the man a power-hungry hypocrite, then I could quite possibly commiserate. But this book is not an attempt to besmirch Jefferson as a villian; nor is it an uncritical celebrat...
While the proliferation of talk shows and tabloids has certainly intensified the appetite for scandal by making such stories readily available to a mass market, the primal urge to know about the sexual secrets of the rich or famous is apparently as timeless as the primal urge itself. Long before ...
ADAMS patriotism and integrity, and even talents of a certain kind, I should be deficient in candor, were I to conceal the conviction, that he does not possess the talents adapted to the Administration of Government, and that there are great and intrinsic defects in his character, which unfit him...
Upon arriving home he noted that his barnyard was full of seaweed, which then prompted a characteristically indiscreet observation: He had made “a good exchange … honors and virtues for manure.” When a violent storm struck on the day of his return, he took it as a providential sign that trouble w...
FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS Abigail had been urging her husband to retire from public life and join her beside the hearth at Quincy. Now, at last, he was finally doing so, albeit at the insistence of the American electorate rather than by any choice of his own. John Quincy, writing from Berlin, ob...