$20-$29. Wife of one president and mother of another, Abigail Adams was an extraordinary woman living at an extraordinary time in American history. A tireless letter writer and diarist, her penetrating and often caustic impressions of most of the major persons of her day--including Ben Franklin, George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and King George III, among others--provide one of the best first-hand accounts of the American Revolution.

Worth buying—if you want a model of how not to write a biography. Dull and superficial, it's little more a five hundred page long summary of Adams' letters, managing to provide absolutely no insights into her personality, or the historical and social forces at work in the world around her. There's little interpretation at all; there were plenty of openings which I could see in the quoted sources for gender/race commentary, but Levin passes them all by with seeming complete obliviousness. Whoever edited this book also deserves a good scolding, both for the awful use of subordinate clauses, and Levin's irritating habit of liberally sprinkling her text with a word or two from Adams' letters at a time, often for no other apparent reason than to point out that eighteenth century orthography is different from that of the present day. Avoid. ( )

Nice well done book on Mrs. Adams. Gives a great insight as to what she went through during those trying times. Nice little tidbits about running the farm while John was away forming a new nation. ( )