Joseph J. Ellis: Founding Brothers

This book has been on my "to read" list for years, and now that I've finally gotten around to it, I question whether it was worth the effort. It just goes to show that the Pulitzer doesn't always go to a work of genius. This is not to say that the book was poorly written. On the contrary, Ellis has a winning style and an enjoyable way with sentences. It is simply a shame that he does not seem to have had anything to say with them.

I suppose an argument could be made that Ellis is trying to use anecdotes from early American history to make a point about the nature of history in general. He seems to have some bone to pick with the common practice of reading history retroactively, of attributing our knowledge of how something turned out to the people who, at the time, had no clue. But the book does little to create any sort of cohesive argument to this effect; it simply drops the idea in from time to time as a reminder. What the reader is left with, then, is a sampling of situations and anecdotes from the period between the revolutionary war and the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, none of which would be terribly interesting or revealing were it not for Ellis' knack for narrative. In short, I didn't learn anything from the book, but at least it wasn't painful to read.