|
Loading... The Education of Henry Adamsby Henry Adams
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  wcpweaver | Oct 29, 2009 |  It was interesting to me to read about the viewpiont of the Civil War as seen from London. After recently reading Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln, another take on the war made for good comparison. Adam's assessment of his own formal education was surprisingly poor. Adam's commentary on some of the contemporary events prompted me to dig into some history references. Minor events from the present day, were sometimes seen as big events back then. I also enjoyed Adam's discussion on the progress of technology through the 1800's, and his own version of Moore's Law, except regarding the use of coal as an energy source. Some seemingly gross assumptions about "future" years like 1960 and 2000, were not far off the mark. (  ) pickwick817 | Aug 24, 2009 | For me, this was really hard to follow. Actually, reading Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire, in which Adams figures prominently, helped me understand the Education better. So did Richard Brookhiser's book on the Adamses. My subsequent study has put Henry Adams more into perspective as a key figure in the development of our nation. ( ) scootm | Aug 23, 2009 | I'm inclined to consider this book more of a text on history than a standard autobiography, and I have rather mixed feelings about it as a whole. As an experimental autobiography, it's a fascinating study, but it's also a slow and long read. I'm not opposed to long books, but this was a rough read, I have to admit. The middle in particular lagged for me, primarily because of a constant discussion of historical and political personalities that I was unfamiliar with. While I have a fair enough familiarity with American history, I'm not particularly familiar with any of the leading personalities of the nineteenth century (except for those who were literary or those who anyone would know, like the Presidents, etc.), and Adams often treats them as if the names are household familiarities, which I don't doubt they were to his contemporary audience. As a result, though, I was sometimes fairly lost, and considerably bored. Still, in the end, it was worthwhile--something I didn't expect to be saying when I was about halfway through the work. The beginning was interesting, though, as was the last 150 pages or so where Adams dealt more with his ideas on progress, history, and social inertia, all of which were interesting and readable. In the end, I recommend this to any student of history or anyone interested in the ways that American and European cultures were changing and reacting to one another in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. It is not, by any means, a fast or overtly entertaining read, but I would say it's worthwhile, perhaps as a side project to read a chapter from per day (chapter lengths are manageable). I wouldn't suggest reading it as I did, all five hundred pages over three days for a class---this, indeed, was rough. (  ) whitewavedarling | Apr 14, 2009 | Slow. Not good. (  ) leeinaustin | Nov 25, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0192823698, Paperback)Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are told, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world. Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ... camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience. He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. --James Marcus (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (1)
Otherwise I found Adams's style and manner to be aggravating and disingenuous to the max. It might be the mood I'm in, but the narrator presumes we're well versed in the politics of his day when in actuality even the worst scandals are forgotten events. To be led to the climax of his father's outmaneuvering the British Prime Minister during the Civil War and then be told, "But that's history and has nothing to do with education," when a single paragraph could have explained everthing is what my grandpa would call "a pisser." In fairness he probably didn't expect it to be read a hundred years later by the general public, having only printed a few copies for friends. I did think his insights to be remarkable and he clearly foresaw the conflicts building that would define the 20th century, but his narcissism—even if ironic—annoyed me from the beginning.
I may read it again when I'm in a better mood.