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    The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
    The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
    The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
    Audiobook14 hours

    The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

    Written by Stacy Schiff

    Narrated by Jason Culp

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    This "glorious" revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize winner is about the most essential Founding Father (Ron Chernow)—the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.

    Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.   Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd and eloquent man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool available to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason. In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.

    ONE OF WALL STREET JOURNAL'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2022 ONE OF LOS ANGELES TIMES TOP 5 NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2022 ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES MOST NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2022 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 And named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by The New Yorker, TIME, Oprah Daily, USA Today, New York Magazine, Air Mail, Boston Globe, and more!

    "A glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important.” —Ron Chernow  

    "A beautifully crafted, invaluable biography…Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future, underscoring the lessons of Adams while reclaiming our nation’s self-evident truths at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten them." —Oprah Daily

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateOct 25, 2022
    ISBN9781478993278
    The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
    Author

    Stacy Schiff

    Stacy Schiff is the author of Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2000, and Saint-Exupery, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. Schiff's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Times Literary Supplement. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for The Revolutionary

    4/5

    66 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5

      Dec 12, 2024

      Growing up outside of Boston, I knew little of Samuel Adams. Stacy Schiff's The Revolutionary, in brilliant writing helped to illuminate the life of Samuel Adams in full. With his genuis of ideas, his undefeatable passion in the cause of liberty, in particular American, his glaring faults and weaknesses, and his stance as the most important and necessary person in the formulating the ideas that stoked the revolutionary fire and then assisting in the foundation of the country in the aftermath.

      A few other items of interest: he was a relatively poor man, though well educated at Harvard, he despised slavery, and he was the greatest advocate for free education for all, including women. And most interesting of all was how he was almost instantaneously forgotten once he had served his presumed purpose. I hope Schiff's work helps to rectify historical shortfall.
    • 4/5

      May 2, 2024

      This is a biography of one of our nation's most significant founders that takes into account the man and his times. The author emphasizes the remarkable accomplishments and unlikely life of one of our nation's founders.
    • 4/5

      Apr 4, 2023

      As I write this, it is March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre (or an "Unhappy Disturbance" if you were British) on a cold night in 1770. It started as an argument between a British soldier and several Boston residents and soon escalated as a crowd gathered, chasing the soldier back to the Customs House, where a sentry stood guard. Other British soldiers came out to defend the soldier as the crowd taunted, throwing snowballs and pieces of ice (and perhaps objects) at the soldiers, daring them to fire. Then, in the confusion, shots were fired, and when the smoke cleared, five people lay dead, while three more were injured.

      Famously, John Adams became the man chosen to defend the British soldiers, though he was by no means a supporter of the British soldiers in Boston. The soldiers--two thousand strong--had arrived in 1768 to quell riots and to enforce the Townsend Duties, which taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea; set up courts to prosecute smugglers; and allowed British officials to search colonists' homes.

      You can imagine how popular all that was. For many years Boston had been the center of colonial discontent. Tensions were already high, and the arrival of the soldiers, 1 for every 8 Bostonians, was destined to create and exacerbate the friction.

      It was no accident that the deaths quickly became the center of an ongoing war of words in the press, the Committees of Correspondence throughout the American Colonies, and the efforts of the Sons of Liberty. And while there were many men in the midst of these efforts one man sticks out as the chief rabble-rouser, a man that King George called the "most dangerous man in the colonies": Samuel Adams.

      Who was this man? To me, my experience with Samuel was as the older cousin of John Adams, the man who saved the Revolution by securing financing for it from Europe, who wrote the Massachusetts constitution, helped write the Declaration of Independence, and became our second president. Sam barely gets a supporting role in that story. And yet, if you were to poll Americans and British of the day, Samuel Adams was among the leading voices, if not the leading voice, in the years up to and during the Revolution.

      So on this anniversary of the Boston Massacre, a seminal event in the years before the American Revolution, I read Stacy Schiff's biography of Samuel Adams, appropriately titled "The Revolutionary." In these pages, we see Samuel as a gifted orator and writer, the man of a hundred pseudonyms, a planner and connecter, an "everyman" who is anything but that. Unique among the Founding Fathers, he never had money, never had resources, and yet was at one point the most wanted man in America.

      Even as the Revolution passed into the Founding of the nation and he began to fade, he remained forefront in the minds of those who did not. On the eve of the anniversary of the Boston Massacre in 1801, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged his role in bringing about the break with England, calling him the "patriarch of liberty" and asking himself if Samuel would approve of his speech. Having read Samuel's rise in spite of failure, I am convinced that it was no amount of hyperbole to see him as more than just a rabble-rouser, but a gifted politician and leader who predicted almost every aspect of the fight for independence, and was seen as almost as important as George Washington by his contemporaries.

      And there's this: it's a really good piece of history and a great addition to the modern understanding of the Founding generation.
    • 5/5

      Feb 2, 2023

      A great biography on an unsung here of the revolution. Schiff's writing is clever, sometimes biting and always enjoyable. The way Adams dealt with Hutchinson sounds like sit com.
    • 5/5

      Jan 14, 2023

      Stacy Schiff delivers another compelling biography of an American Founding Father.
    • 4/5

      Dec 6, 2022

      Samuel Adams often feels like a Founding Father doomed to be overlooked. My previous impressions of him (from snippets in books and documentaries) were of a rabble rouser, someone who participated in the early days of the American Revolution but who didn't really have the intellectual foundations of figures like his cousin John Adams. This biography is well positioned to reframe that impression. Samuel Adams was a Harvard graduate, a member of the Massachusetts house of representatives, and one of the most influential figures in the early American Revolution. Adams was actively involved in organizing protests against the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act, and he had a role in many of the incidents which centered around Boston such as the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. Politically active and influential until the end of his life, Adams emerges in this biography as a pivotal revolutionary in American history, and I appreciate the fresh approach to a Founding Father who has received less attention.
    • 4/5

      Nov 13, 2022

      Samuel Adams is a difficult figure. An ardent patriot who was tireless and fully committed to the cause of the colonists. And yet he could be disingenuous, unreasonable and unlikable. However, as this biography makes clear, Adams was a highly effective contributor in the early stages of the revolutionary period.

      The book itself is well researched and contains an excellent amount of detail. Unfortunately, the author’s writing style can be tedious. The work itself is not only quite long, but it contains a very significant amount of original quotes which can try the reader after some point.

      A good, interesting but certainly not outstanding biography.