John Adams (2001)

It is finished! I have completed my reading of David McCullough's incredible John Adams before the year end. Friends and neighbors encouraged me to begin reading this mighty tome before the November election.

Why didn't we learn these things in school I asked over and over? This worthy book explains so much about why our country is like it is today but at the same time had me tearing up over deaths in a family of individuals I came to care about.

I have to thank pseudo family Gary (and Mary Beth) for not only playing Stephen Hopkins brilliantly in 1776 but also lending me his copy of John Adams.

If any author had dared to have two Presidents, who were friends until the end of their lives, one who wrote the Declaration of Independence and one who spoke the words that forged a new nation, die hours apart on the same day, which just happened to be the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, critics would complain loudly. But that is just what happened. What a wonderful story of a man and the country he helped to birth!