Samuel Adams, Ira Stoll
Samuel Adams, Ira Stoll
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Samuel Adams
A Life

Author: Ira Stoll

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Unabridged: 10 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/18/2008

Synopsis

"I pity Mr. Sam Adams," his cousin John Adams wrote to his wife, "for he was born a Rebel." At virtually every juncture of the American Revolution, from the Boston Massacre and Tea Party to Lexington and Concord and the ratification of the Constitution, Samuel Adams played a forceful role. With his fiery rhetoric and religious fervor, he was in many respects the moral conscience of the new nation. "The love of liberty," he thundered, "is interwoven in the soul of man, and can never be totally extinguished."

And yet history has neglected him; today Samuel Adams is best known as a brand of beer. As relations with Great Britain healed in the nineteenth century, historians were all too willing to dismiss him as a zealot; Adams's distrust of secularism (he envisioned America as a "Christian Sparta") has not endeared him to many contemporary scholars, either. Ira Stoll's fascinating biography not only restores this figure to his rightful place in history but portrays him as a man of God whose skepticism of a powerful central government, uncompromising support for freedom of the press, concern about the influence of money on elections, voluble love of liberty, and selfless endurance in a war for freedom has enormous relevance to Americans today.

About Ira Stoll

Ira Stoll is vice president and managing editor of the New York Sun, which he helped to found. A graduate of Harvard University and president of the Harvard Crimson, Stoll has also been a consultant to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, managing editor and Washington correspondent for the Forward, and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Douglas on September 13, 2014

I really enjoyed this one. I had never taken a close look at the contribution Sam Adams made to our liberties, and this fine biography shows that the contribution was extensive. Here are a couple of favorite moments. One adversary said, after Adams' death, that his politics were derived from "two max......more

Goodreads review by Lora on May 30, 2009

I really enjoyed Ira Stoll's take on Samuel Adams, and his attempt to restore him to his rightful place as one of the most influential men of the American Revolution, and certainly as the firecracker who started it all. He also establishes the role of his faith in his life, beliefs and decisions. Wh......more

Goodreads review by Brian on May 22, 2016

In “Samuel Adams a Life” Ira Stoll does not write a narrative history in the style of writers like David McCullough (who he quotes a lot in this text). As a result, the writing is not as griping. If you don’t have a predisposed interest in the subject matter this book will not create it for you. But......more

Goodreads review by Vinny on November 20, 2017

Lots about other people and seems to go off on tangents. Just kind of bleh. Doesn't have the excitement of Hamilton, or John Adams.......more

Goodreads review by Mark on May 09, 2020

The writing in this book comes off as cold and technical. The cadence is more like technical writing than the telling of history. I suppose its footnotes function well enough as where to find source material. All-in-all I was disappointed.......more

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