His cousin, John, may be a more popular name, buy there is no doubt that our country's founding can be linked directly to Samuel Adams efforts. A truly interesting read about a lesser mentioned fore-father of our nation. From the Sugar Act through the US Constitution, Samuel helped engineer our enjoyed freedoms and liberties. ( )

Finished Mark Puls, Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution. A good, cradle to grave biography that comes in under 200 pages.

An early but relatively unknown founding father, known unfortunately by many as a brewer rather than a early revolutionary father.

Integral to the revolutionary movement starting in Boston, spreading throughout Massachusetts and then later through an the Colonies. He was responsible for a letter and pamphlet writing campaign and organizing committees of communication throughout the Colonies that allowed for better communication and coordination during the Stamp Act and Stamp Act Congress, the calling for the creation of the 1st and 2nd Continental Congress she the Declaration of Independence.

He worked with other notable founding father James Otis, Dr. Joseph Warren, John Hancock and his cousin John Adams who he slowly worked into the revolutionary movement after being slow to become involved.

A member of the Massachusetts Assembly, the 1st and 2nd Continental Congress, and Governor of Massachusetts . Helped to write the Articles of Confederation, the Massachusetts Constitution and a early leader calling for independence from England.

Great narrative style and a worthy read. ( )

This was an interesting if, perhaps, somewhat flattering portrait of the political life of the man who, according to the author, practically single handedly brought about the American Revolution. There was very little about his personal life although the author warned that little was actually known. He was a master political strategist and polemist and this is well presented. It seemed to me that anything that would be considered critical of the man, such as his failed business ventures and his lack of ability to handle money so that his family was usually in dire financial circumstances seemed to be glossed over. I wonder if McCullough would have presented a more balance picture of the man as he did of Washington in 1776. I read this book immediately after reading the McCullough books John Adams and 1776. I am new to reading history that's not in a textbook, but this book did not seem to be nearly as well written as balanced, or as thorough as the McCullough books. ( )

We are in sore need of a good modern biography of Sam Adams. Unfortunately, Mark Puls' new Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution (2006, Palgrave Macmillan) comes nowhere close to filling the bill.

While Puls' thesis (that Sam Adams played a vital role in bringing about the Revolution from a philosophical and public relations standpoint) is fundamentally sound and deserves a great deal of attention, his book contains multiple serious flaws which fatally undermine its entire structure.

Let me begin with what I view as one of the more substantial problems: sources. Puls' footnotes lead back, nearly all the time, to books which can hardly be described as at the forefront of modern historical scholarship. George Bancroft's History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent was published in 1882, while William Jackman's History of the American Nation came along in 1911. Both are cited repeatedly, as are Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People (1931) and the immediate post-Revolutionary histories of Mercy Otis Warren and William Gordon. All these are interesting in their own rights, it's true, but not exactly current. Puls' main sources for Adams' life appear to be the 1904 four-volume edition of his writings edited by Harry Alonzo Cushing and two earlier biographies (those of William Wells, published in 1865 and James Hosmer, which first appeared in 1884). Not once is a mention made of the Samuel Adams Papers which are mainly held by the New York Public Library. If Mr. Puls did any actual archival research at all, he certainly didn't make that fact particularly evident.

Of the 100 sources included in Puls' bibliography, exactly half were published prior to 1950. Excusing the published primary document collections which one would expect to see used here, such as Eliot's Debates and the collections of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, we are still left with an astonishingly high number of sources that are more than sixty years old, among them those which Puls cites most often. The scholarship of Bernard Bailyn, Robert Middlekauff, Pauline Maier, Edmund Morgan, Gordon Wood and many others cannot and should not be so casually cast aside - their omission here is frankly stunning (I should note that while some of their works are included in the bibliography they are rarely if ever cited in the text, and Puls seems to have made little effort to incorporate their views). Also, Puls' only source for quotes by and about Benjamin Franklin appears to be the 1982 The Real Benjamin Franklin, published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies and which seems rather suspect to me (there are many good Franklin biographies out there, it probably goes without saying).

If it'd been only the sources that I had trouble with, I would have minded some but probably would have gotten over it. Alas, there's much more. The book is afflicted with a staggering number of errors, ranging from the factual to the typographical. In the strangely-titled "Who is Who" section which precedes the text, Puls lists John Burgoyne as "British general who defeated American General Horatio Gates at Saratoga" (when of course it was the other way round, which Puls does manage to note correctly in both the entries on Gates and in the text). Richard Fifield is titled "Adam's father-in-law"; he was actually Sam's maternal grandfather. William Franklin (Ben's son) suddenly finds himself the royal governor of Pennsylvania rather than New Jersey.

On page 37, Puls inaccurately describes the procedure for smallpox inoculation used in the pre-Revolutionary period; on page 49 he writes "The English planned to encourage immigration to the interior regions of the continent," when actually the Proclamation of 1763 expressly limited such settlement except under certain approved conditions. The dates given for the repeal of the Townshend Duties and the Evacuation of Boston are incorrect, and Puls' depiction of the revisions of Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence at the hands of Congress as "minor editing" is almost unbelievable. The British captain who was tried for his role in the Boston Massacre is alternately named Preston (his actual name), then Prescott, and then finally is back to his correct name by the time of his trial. Historian Benjamin Woods Labaree, author of the definitive work on the Boston Tea Party, is named Larabee throughout the text and the bibliography. And these are just the most serious mistakes which I happened to see; I have not mentioned the various spelling and other grammatical/typographical mistakes which ought to have been caught in the editing process.

Perhaps most galling of all is the lack of any sort of meaningful analysis of what is the key question about Adams in the years leading up to the Revolution: just what was his role in bringing about the Boston Massacre? Was there a secret plot to foment such an act, or was it simply a surprise event? Puls completely misses the ball on this question, failing even to discuss the various possible answers.

A final matter with which I must take exception is Puls' frustrating use of "Samuel Adams" throughout the book. The only time the word "Sam" ever appears is to note that's how Adams signed the Declaration of Independence. For the humble Adams, "Sam" seems to fit so much more nicely - Puls might have put it to good use.

While writing a biography of Sam Adams is trickier than for many of the other Framers (who never met a scrap of paper they didn't save), he deserves a cleaner and much more complete treatment than he's gotten from Mark Puls. I am unable to recommend this book in its current form.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2006/10/book-review-samuel-adams-father-of.html ( )