Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 038097763X, Hardcover)

That John Adams was a great American revolutionary patriot, there is no doubt. That he remained great once the revolution was won is a matter of considerable debate, in Adams's own time as well as ours. Even a sometime ally portrayed him as a "petty-minded egoist fussing about his own dignity," an aspirant to leadership who urged that the man who held his office be addressed as "His Highness, the President of the United States of America and Protector of Their Liberties."

Still, Adams, that hard-minded New Englander, was a shrewd leader with a clear agenda: he labored to extend national power over the sometimes ragtag, sometimes rebellious individual states, and eventually to forge an empire led by a sort of "republican sovereign" just short of a king. These goals put him squarely at odds with his fellow revolutionary Thomas Jefferson, an often self-contradictory champion of states' rights, against whom Adams won the presidency in 1796--and to whom he lost that office after an astonishingly acrimonious campaign in the election of 1800.

Bernard Weisberger provides a highly engaging, thoroughly well-written account of the Adams-Jefferson rivalry, which traded on both personality and ideology--and, indeed, on markedly different visions of human nature. His book is timely, for many of the issues Adams and Jefferson argued over remain with Americans today and are the subject of constant controversy. Which is, Weisberger says, just as it should be; it means that "the revolution is still at work." --Gregory McNamee