John Adams

His first book since Truman, from one of America's most distinguished and popular biographers. Destined for the same kind of sweeping success as his Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman, John Adams is a powerful, deeply moving biography that reads like an epic historical novel. Breathing fresh life into American history, it takes as its subject the extraordinary man who became the second president of the United States. A man whose adventurous life and spirited rivalry with Thomas Jefferson encompasses both the American Revolution and the birth of the young republic. Deftly written with a brilliant eye for detail, McCullough describes the childhood, youth and coming of age of Adams, the fiercely driven Massachusetts farmer-lawyer whose marriage to Abigail is one of the great real-life love stories. He also tells the story of his lifelong rival Jefferson, the Virginia planter and slaveowner. Through their lives, McCullough explores the extraordinary factors that transformed thirteen colonies into an united nation that eventually brought these two distinctly dissimilar men to the presidency. Sweeping the reader from America to Europe, and combining a cast of compelling characters with probing explorations of politics, courage, idealism, love, friendship and life, John Adams, is bound to be the most talked about book of the autumn.