Books and Cooks Ithaca -- July 2000
The Education of Henry Adams
Our rating: This book was unrated.
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Discussion date: July 26, 2000
Discussion place: Amanda's place
Menu: Barbecue dinner
An Education on the Education of Henry Adams
Amazon says:
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.
The Books and Cooks Education of Henry Adams Informal Reading Guide
After two separate attempts to read and discuss this book, we have declared Education of Henry Adams a failure. The biggest question at the meeting was, why was this book so difficult to read? Consensus was that it was not a bad book, but nobody was able to get interested in it (hence, the unwillingness to rate it).
This Page Last Revised: November 21, 2000.