Saturday, December 18, 2010

January 2011 Book Choice: Abigail Adams By Woody Holton


From Publishers Weekly:

While Abigail Adams has always been viewed as one of the most illustrious of America's founding mothers, University of Richmond historian Holton (Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution), drawing on the rich collection of Adams's letters and other manuscripts, paints a strong-minded woman whose boldness developed in the context of the revolutionary era in which she lived. Holton offers a captivating portrait of a reformer both inside and outside the home. Best known for exhorting her husband, John Adams, to remember the ladies in devising America's new political system, she also, Holton has discovered, wrote a will leaving most of her property to her granddaughters, in defiance of the law that made her husband the master of all she owned. Furthermore, she was a businesswoman and invested her own earnings in ways John did not always approve of. Tracing Adams's life from her childhood as the daughter of a poor parson to her long and sometimes uncertain courtship with John, her joys and sorrows as a mother and her life as the wife of a president, Holton's superb biography shows us a three-dimensional Adams as a forward-thinking woman with a mind of her own.

Post your comments and responses to the book throughout reading and once you are finished!

Books for the 2010-2011 Reading Year

October 2010:  The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

November 2010:  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

No meeting in December

January 2011:  Abigail Adams by Woody Holton

February 2011:  Straight Man by Richard Russo

March 2011:  A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

April 2011:  In the Neighborhood by Peter Lovenheim

May 2011:  Last Call by Daniel Okrent

June 2011:  A Midwife's Tale:  The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary 1785 - 1812 by Laura Thatcher Ulrich

July 2011:  Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

August 2011:  House of God by Samuel Shem

September 2011:  Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

As always, we have a varied and exciting collection.  Happy reading and we hope to see you on the second Monday at the Penfield Starbucks, 7:30 pm.