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  • Friends Divided

  • John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
  • By: Gordon S. Wood
  • Narrated by: James Lurie
  • Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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Friends Divided

By: Gordon S. Wood
Narrated by: James Lurie
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Publisher's Summary

From the great historian of the American Revolution, New York Times best-selling and Pulitzer-winning Gordon Wood, comes a majestic dual biography of two of America's most enduringly fascinating figures, whose partnership helped birth a nation and whose subsequent falling out did much to fix its course.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slave owner while Adams, the overachiever from New England's rising middling classes, painfully aware he was no aristocrat, was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist view of government. They worked closely in the crucible of revolution, crafting the Declaration of Independence and leading, with Franklin, the diplomatic effort that brought France into the fight. But ultimately their profound differences would lead to a fundamental crisis in their friendship and in the nation writ large as they became the figureheads of two entirely new forces, the first American political parties. It was a bitter breach, lasting through the presidential administrations of both men and beyond.

But late in life, something remarkable happened: These two men were nudged into reconciliation. What started as a grudging trickle of correspondence became a great flood, and a friendship was rekindled over the course of hundreds of letters. In their final years, they were the last surviving founding fathers and cherished their role in this mighty young republic as it approached the half-century mark in 1826. At last, on the afternoon of July 4, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration, Adams let out a sigh and said, "At least Jefferson still lives." He died soon thereafter. In fact, a few hours earlier on that same day, far to the south in his home in Monticello, Jefferson died as well.

Arguably, no relationship in this country's history carries as much freight as that of John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Gordon Wood has more than done justice to these entwined lives and their meaning; he has written a magnificent new addition to America's collective story.

©2017 Gordon S. Wood (P)2017 Penguin Audio

Critic Reviews

“This is an engrossing story, which Wood tells with a mastery of detail and a modern plainness of expression that makes a refreshing contrast with the 18th-century locutions of his subjects.” (The New York Times Book Review)

“Lucid and learned.... Wood has become the leading historian of the ‘Founding Fathers’.... Never has John Adams been more relevant than today.” (The Wall Street Journal)

"Whenever I read Gordon Wood, the dean of 18th-century American historians, I feel as if I am absorbing wisdom at the feet of the master. Friends Divided is teeming with exceptionally acute and unvarnished insights into Thomas Jefferson and John Adams as they do battle for the nation's soul. Jefferson's sunny, almost Panglossian, optimism, juxtaposed with the dark, dyspeptic musings of Adams, presents readers with nothing less than a vivid composite portrait of the American mind." (Ron Chernow, author of Grant and Alexander Hamilton)

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