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The Education of Henry Adams: A Centennial Version (Massachusetts Historical Society)
Henry Adams Manufacturer: Massachusetts Historical Society ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0934909911 |
Book Description
Both a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and at the head of the Modern Library's list of the one hundred best English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century, The Education of Henry Adams has long been revered as a great work of literature. Written by Adams in the third person, the book became known for founding a new genre best described as "an education" -- an account not of life, but of learning. A tireless historian, politician, and traveler, Adams was from first to last a dedicated learner capable of great originality. In this text, Adams uses his background information (such as place of birth, voyage destinations, and alma mater) but little else, placing his protagonist in front of life's various pitfalls with the object of providing those stepping out into the world with the tools they need to handle themselves in the face of adversity. By inventing his own fictional missteps, Adams allows readers to educate themselves on how to approach life's curveballs.Although The Education of Henry Adams has long been considered a classic, until now the only editions available were those from 1907 and 1918. The former, which appeared in Adams's lifetime, was a private printing of only one hundred copies, containing hundreds of printer's errors and editorial inconsistencies. The latter, printed by the Massachusetts Historical Society and Houghton Mifflin Company after Adams's death in March of 1918, amounted to a wholesale modernization of Adams's work, leaving telling defects, including stylistic inconsistencies and incomplete sentences. With The Education of Henry Adams: A Centennial Version, editors Edward Chalfant and Conrad Edick Wright have at long last returned this celebrated book to the author's vision. Combining close attention to the private printing's typesetting and editorial shortcomings with valuable insights into the history of the book and Adams's reasons for writing it, they have also inserted marginal corrections by Adams in his working copies of the 1907 printing. With an introductory note, an invitation to readers, and a postscript, they have both traced the text's own story and offered a compelling interpretation of the author's motives.
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best of available.......2007-05-13
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The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Oxford World's Classics)
Henry Adams Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0192823698 |
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Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are told,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world.
Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ... camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.
He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. --James Marcus
Book Description
'Every generalisation that we settled forty years ago, is abandoned' As a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, his The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and the country's education from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, incorporating the Civil War, capitalist expansion and the growth of the United States as a world power. Exploring America as both a success and a failure, contradiction was the very impetus that compelled Adams to write the Education, in which he was also able to voice his deep scepticism about mankind's power to control the direction of history. Written with immense wit and irony, reassembling the past while glimpsing the future, Adams's vision expresses what Henry James declared the `complex fate' to be an American, and remains one of the most compelling works of American autobiography today.Download Description
As a journalist, historian, and novelist born into a distinguished family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was inescapably a part of the American experience. The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and the country's development from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, and became an immediate bestseller, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. The Civil War, economic expansion, and the growth of the United States are among its subjects, as well as his own 'dynamic theory of history'.Customer Reviews:
Interesting Read.......2006-04-30
Not what I had hoped for..........2006-04-03
Anyone interested in American History will love this book!.......2005-10-25
A meditation on an era.......2005-08-27
The cold classic of an unlikeable genius .......2004-10-27
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Henry Adams: Novels Mont Saint Michel The Education (Democracy: An American Novel, Esther: A Novel, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the Education of Henry Adams, Poems)
Henry Adams Manufacturer: Library of America ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0940450127 |
Book Description
The major works of Henry Adams, one of the most powerful writers of the late nineteenth century, collected in one volume for the first time. Contains "The Education of Henry Adams" and "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres," his remarkable works of nonfiction combining philosophical and historical speculation with autobiographical musings on his famous heritage. Also includes his two novels of American politics and religion, "Democracy" and "Esther."Customer Reviews:
Henry Adams, Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry Adams.......2007-02-13
Greatest hits.......2003-01-21
"Democracy" is one of the best political novels of all time and speaking as a denizen of the nation's capital, very little has changed. Esther is attempt deal with the "woman question." Clearly the inspiration of both books is Mrs. Henry Adams. Known as "Voltaire in petticoats" (Henry James), she later tragically took her own life following a period of depression. The death of his wife led to Henry Adams' retirement from public life. This subject is covered in Ernest Samuels' wonderful biography (which I also recommend).
I suggest a look at his biography since the subject of Marion Clover Adams is avoided entirely in "The Education of Henry Adams." Henry Adams may not discuss his wife, but he does touch on nearly everything else of importance in his autobiography. "Growing up Adams," life in Europe with Garibaldi's forces, life at the British legation in London during the Civil War are all addressed. The best and probably the most key chapter in the book is the one entitled "The Virgin and Dynamo." Adams uses the 1876 cenntenial fair as a departure to meditate of the impact of the industrial revolution. Adams believed with the growth of technology that man would somehow outgrow the simple humanity of the Middle Ages (it would have been interesting if Adams had lived long enough to meet someone like Carl Jung to see what he would have to say on this subject!). One of the foremost historians (the Library of America has also issued the history of Jefferson and Madison's Administrations, which is a classic), Adams became interested in the Middle Ages and his survey of the two great cathedrals of France Chartes and Mont St. Michel is the final book in the volume. I cannot recommend this book too highly, it is a must for all fans of Henry Adams and those who would like to experience him for the first time.
one of the most brilliant minds in American literature.......2000-06-13
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Texas Aggies Go to War: In Service of Their Country (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas a & M University)
Henry C. Dethloff , and John A. Adams Jr. Manufacturer: Texas A&M University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 1585444707 |
Book Description
When their country calls, Texas Aggies go to war. From the Spanish-American War and World War I to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Aggies have been in the forefront of America's armed forces, producing more officers than any other school outside the service academies. More than 20,000 Texas Aggies served in World War II, for instance, including more than 14,000 as commissioned officers. Trained in leadership and the knowledge required for warfare, Aggies have served with distinction in all branches of the military service.In this first-ever compilation of the impressive war record of Texas Aggies, stories of individual soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines are displayed with an abundance of statistics, maps, and tables. These narratives include:
First-person accounts of Aggie heroism in battle in all the wars in which A&M former students have fought; The horrific experiences of some of the eighty-seven Aggies who were stationed at Corregidor and Bataan; The perils of five Aggies who participated in the raid over Tokyo with Jimmie Doolittle; The heroics of the seven Medal of Honor recipients from Texas A&M during World War II; James Earl Rudder's leadership of the Ranger assault at Normandy on D-Day; Examples of vigorous support and devotion to duty given by Aggies in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East.
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The EDUCATION Of HENRY ADAMS. Introduction by James Truslow Adams.
Henry. [Mod Lib]. Adams Manufacturer: The Modern Library, ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: B000MZ5DNC |
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The Education of Henry Adams (The Modern Library)
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: B000FCGJOY |
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The Education of Henry Adams
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Co (Pap) ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 039507326X |
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The Education of Henry Adams (Cliffs Notes)
Stanley P. Baldwin Manufacturer: Cliffs Notes ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0764586483 |
Book Description
The original CliffsNotes study guides offer a look into critical elements and ideas within classic works of literature. The latest generation of titles in this series also features glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format.CliffsNotes on The Education of Henry Adams explores the focal character’s boyhood world through the voice of Henry Adams as a man in his late 60s. Speaking in third person, the narrator treats the younger Henry objectively, which establishes the style of the book.
Following Henry’s lifelong protests of the limitations of formal education, this study guide provides summaries and commentaries for each of 35 chapters within what has been termed “experimental literature” and an outstanding work of nonfiction. Other features that help you figure out this important work include
Classic literature or modern-day treasure — you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.
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This concise supplement to Adams' The Education of Henry Adams helps students understand the overall structure of the work, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author.Customer Reviews:
A guide to all the obscure references in Adams's masterpiece.......2004-09-21
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The Education of Henry Adams
Manufacturer: Modern Library ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: B000BR1NNK |
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A Formula of His Own; Henry Adam's Literary Experiment
John J. Conder Manufacturer: Univ of Chicago Pr (Tx) ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0226114376 |
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