David McCullough’s JOHN ADAMS was the book that got me started on AMERICAN STORY. “Of course, before you can care about any history you have to connect with it, and for most of my life I wasn’t connected at all. American history felt as lifeless as the faces on Mount Rushmore. The American Revolution? A few paintings. And then that changed.
In 2001, I was living in San Anselmo, California — a small town in affluent Marin County with my wife and stepson when I picked up a book and started to read.
In the beginning the image that stood out for me was a pair of horsemen crackling through newly fallen snow. Had anyone chosen to turn and look at them — an unlikely event since the landscape they rode through, Massachusetts, was for all intents and purposes still wilderness — few, if any, would have known who they were. They were riding to Philadelphia, a journey that would take them two weeks. The date was January 24, 1776. This snowy scene is the opening of David McCullough’s extraordinary book John Adams, a vivid and moving biography of one of America’s Founding Fathers. What McCullough did for me in that scene and in the pages that followed was to make entirely real (as if I were living it with them) the unprecedented and monumentally unlikely experiment of self-government that John Adams and his fellow colonialists had embarked upon — now well over two centuries ago.
Reading McCullough’s John Adams was the first time these events — and the people who propelled them — ever felt real to me, and the experience was revelatory. John Adams’ energy — intelligent, passionate, yet still sober in the manner of an 18th-century New Englander — reverberated with idealism for his extraordinary moment, which he recognized as something pivotal in human history. “How few of the human race,” he wrote to his wife Abigail, “have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? How few have ever had anything more of choice in government than in climate?” (From ETHAN RUSSELL:AN AMERICAN STORY )
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