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Sebastian Ritscher
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THE REVOLUTIONARY: SAMUEL ADAMS

Stacy Schiff

Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff, author of national bestsellers The Witches and Cleopatra, offers a revealing new look at Samuel Adams, America's most revolutionary founding father.
Thomas Jefferson once asserted that "for depth of purpose, zeal, and sagacity, no man in Congress exceeded, if any equaled, Sam Adams." John Adams called him "the most elegant writer, the most sagacious politician, and celebrated patriot perhaps of all." But in spite of his celebrated status among America's founding fathers as a revolutionary leader, Samuel Adams' life and achievements have been largely overshadowed in the history books.

Nonetheless, as the fiery moral backbone of the American Revolution, it was Adams who first suggested that the colonies band together. He was the man who set the stage for the Boston Massacre, and he worked tirelessly to spread the news of its violence throughout the colonies. He masterminded the Boston Tea Party, perhaps the most powerful symbol of America's struggle for independence, and when Paul Revere rode to Lexington, it was to deliver his warning to Samuel Adams.

Now, in THE REVOLUTIONARY SAM ADAMS, Stacy Schiff brings her masterful skill as historian and storyteller to the life of Samuel Adams, examining his transformation from the listless, failing son of a wealthy family into the tireless, silver-tongued revolutionary who rallied the likes of John Hancock and John Adams behind him. Gripping and revelatory, this book is a long-overdue chapter in the history of the American Revolution.

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; Cleopatra: A Life, winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; and most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Government, she lives in New York City. Her books have been published in more than 40 countries.
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Published 2022-10-25 by Little Brown

Comments

...masterful new biography... She knows the terrain, and she knows how to bring out the excitement in a subject too often viewed as dusty. Mostly, however, she is a master biographer. She has a gift for converting exhaustive research into propulsive narrative and for going deep on episodes that shed the most light on her subjects... reads like a great short story. These pages contain great drama and constant motion; Schiff lets the stakes build, and build, until the dam is ready to burst... To read this book is to immerse oneself in a very particular and thrilling time and place.

THE REVOLUTIONARY is at #9 on the Hardcover Nonfiction list (November 20, 2022)

A wildly entertaining exploration of the roots of American political theatre.

Schiff imparts...a particular kind of arch humor, a pleasure gathered from the information being shared. These are qualities familiar to readers of her best-selling, award-winning, really good biographies, the latest of which [is], The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams... The hero is finally drawn into the light, having found a biographer who also writes in longhand, and can make fresh the history we all thought we knew already.

In her terrific new biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff presents readers with a vivid sense of this complicated man. Electrifying... Schiff writes with keen insight and wit throughout. By the end of The Revolutionary, attentive readers will vibrate with questions about the parallels between Adams' political era and our own.

...a beautifully crafted, invaluable biography from a Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author... Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future.

Riveting, suspenseful, and even laugh-out-loud reading, as Adams outflanks the British at every turn... A vivid and evocative writer, Schiff excels in her portrayal of Boston in its agony and anger... Superb. Read more...

For the epigraph of her concluding chapter, Ms. Schiff turns to a contemporary, the recently deceased historical novelist Hilary Mantel. "History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury." Sifting historical landfill in "The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams," Stacy Schiff has produced a delightfully enthralling and insightful account of an elusive Founding Father. Samuel Adams "did not preen for posterity," but we now know him much better than we did. Perhaps even better than he'd want us to.

The inimitable Stacy Schiff, author of utterly captivating books.returns with a biography of one of the most pivotal and oddly neglected of all the U.S. Founding Fathers: Samuel Adams, cousin to the more famous politician (and second president) John. Schiff's book finds the real man behind the Revolutionary mythos.

Step aside, Thomas Jefferson; let's talk about the man whose devotion to resistance behavior makes him, for some, the most essential figure in the American Revolution. Samuel Adams comes to electrifying life through this Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's meticulous research and dynamic storytelling as a man of principle and persuasion.

Schiff masterfully chronicles the myriad twists and turns of Adams's life... understands how to translate even the most knotty history into quick-paced narrative.

...a thrilling, timely account... informed on every page by scholarship, but Schiff, as Adams himself did, knows how to hold an audience.

Stacy Schiff has mastered the art of writing thoroughly researched, often captivating biographies, breathing new life into history.