The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams's Pulitzer Prize- winning autobiography tells not only his own life story, as seen through the lens of his lifelong quest for education, but the story of the development of the American mind throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. John McDonough fits his delivery to the steady cadence and stately parallelisms of Adams's prose and incorporates Adams's occasional snippet of Latin, German, or French with smooth ease. Adams's narrative is told from a great emotional and chronological distance; McDonough captures that wonderfully, letting the story unroll from his lips one measured word at a time. Indeed, the production's only weakness is that his leisurely delivery makes a long book seem even longer at times. G.T.B. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine