“John Quincy Adams” is author and historian Harlow Unger’s most recently published biography.  Among his nearly two dozen books, Unger has authored biographies of James Monroe, John Hancock, Lafayette, Patrick Henry and Noah Webster.  His latest work, on George Washington and the creation of the presidency, will be published in the next few weeks.

Unger’s “John Quincy Adams” is an interesting and fast-paced – but not exhaustive – biography of our sixth president.  Clocking in at just over 300 pages, Unger’s book covers a tremendous amount of ground in a short amount of time.  In contrast to Joseph Wheelan’s biography of John Quincy (which devotes three-quarters of its pages to John Quincy’s post-presidential years), Unger reserves that much of his book for Adams’s pre-presidency.

And although this book is nominally focused on John Quincy Adams, in its early chapters it often seems as much a book about John Quincy’s parents, John and Abigail Adams, as anyone else. Reading further, I was provided such a liberal (and useful) dose of historical context that I almost concluded this is not a biography at all, but is instead…

– Click here for the full review at BestPresidentialBios.com –