Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution - Softcover

Bober, Natalie S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0689819161 ISBN 13: 9780689819162

Publisher: Simon Pulse, 1998

Synopsis

The wife of one president and the mother of another, Abigail Adams was an extraordinary woman in her own right. She experienced the gathering storm of the Revolutionary War and saw the battle of Bunker Hill from a hilltop near her home. The letters written by Abigail Adams to her friends and family bring the Revolutionary period alive, mingling details of everyday life with the momentous events of her time. Abigail Adams is given her own place in history in this award-winning biography, which captures the personality of its subject and the time in which she lived.

About this title

About the Author

Natalie S. Bober is an award-winning biographer and a historian with a long-standing interest in the eighteenth century. She lectures extensively, has taught and served as a consultant on the secondary and college levels, and was part of the Ken Burns film documentary on Thomas Jefferson. Her most recent books include A Restless Spirit: The Story of Robert Frost; Thomas Jefferson: Man on a Mountain; and Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution, winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and the Golden Kite Award of the SCBWI. She resides with her husband in Westchester County, New York, and derives great pleasure from her grandchildren, who happily serve as readers and critics of her books.

From Booklist

Gr. 6^-12. Think of this biography as a portrait. Not the smooth, impassive painting reproduced on the jacket, but an intricate mosaic made of colorful bits of fact, emotion, period detail, and letters, letters, letters. Bober nudges readers to look beyond their twentieth-century expectations and become absorbed in another age. She creates a detailed eighteenth-century background showing Adams as the product of her times: an educated, intelligent, and capable woman in an age when the expectations and challenges of a woman's role were different from what they are today, but no less complex. Often separated from her husband John, Abigail wrote letters to him and to others constantly. Throughout the text, Abigail's voice is heard through quotations from her letters. Thorough research of this first-person resource gives Bober a comfortable familiarity with Abigail's personality as well as her personal history, which is interwoven with the turbulent history of her times. As in Bober's Thomas Jefferson: Man on a Mountain (1988), meticulous research and documentation give the book authority, good writing gives it clarity, and sympathetic understanding gives it humanity. An excellent biography. Carolyn Phelan

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon Pulse
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0689819161
• ISBN 13: 9780689819162
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272