Ernest Smith

As my guest blogger for this week, I have asked Jack Hoey III to write a review of a book, but Jack, being Jack, took this request one step further and shared his thoughts on an entire genre.  Jack is a great friend of mine and I am honored to have him share on my blog this week.

There is no single book that has changed my life so profoundly that it stands above all others. So in choosing to write about a book that impacted me, I decided to write briefly about a genre I love, and the book that directed me towards it.

During the spring semester of my freshman year in college, I read David McCullough’s biography, John Adams. It was the first biography I had ever read and I realized that I had discovered an entire category of books waiting to be read. McCullough will never be remembered as an exceptional scholar but his works have done something very, very important: they make people interested in history.

This is no small feat – history has a reputation for being dry and boring. Unfortunately, that reputation is often well-deserved. See, the readability of any book really depends on the writer and, sad to say, many historians are simply poor writers. But John Adams was exciting, it was inspiring, and it gave me a perspective that was entirely new to me. I realized that the idyllic period of American history I had learned about in school was a silly myth – our country has always
experienced strife and division, partisan arguments and personal political attacks.

What I realized, however, was that far from diminishing my views of American origins and the Founding Fathers, understanding history enriched them. Yes, John Adams was one of the greatest of the Founding Fathers and yes, he was kind of a jerk. But understanding the antagonistic side of him makes him more real. It is especially important to  understand Adams’ character when looking at his friendship with Thomas Jefferson, which was often strained. Yet this friendship was precious to Adams, who repeatedly tried to mend it – which is a rather extraordinary action for a man who tended to be proud and arrogant.

John Adams is not the best books I have ever read; it is not even the best biography I have ever read. But it will always have a fond place in my heart as the book that made me realize how much I loved biography. If you have never read biography, you should. Here are five of my favorite biographies (note that some of them have multiple volumes):

1. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt – by Edmund Morris
2. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill (2 vols.) – by William Manchester
3. The Years of Lyndon Johnson (3 vols., soon to be 4) – by Robert Caro
4. R.E. Lee: A Biography (4 vols.) – by Douglas Southall Freeman
5. Truman – by David McCullough