Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

John Quincy Adams. By Lynn Hudson Parsons. (Madison: Madison House, 1998. xviii, 284 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-954612-54-0.)

This is an excellent biography. One of the dusk-jacket blurbs touts it as "the best one-volume biography of this great American." I would go further. It is also superior to the two-volume biography by Samuel Flagg Bemis, the first volume of which won the Pulitzer Prize a generation ago. This account, to be sure, is less complete than Bemis's. But it incorporates most of the historical scholarship that has been done since Bemis put pen to paper a half century ago. It also is more readable and intellectually more honest. John Quincy Adams, who among other things characterized the Constitution as a "menstrous rag," was sanitized both by his history-conscious family and by Bemis. In the hands of Lynn Hudson Parsons, more of the whole man is presented, warts and all. . . .

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