This book is less a biography of Samuel Adams and more a history of all the 18th-century politics he was involved in. And there's a reason for that; perhaps because his primary occupation was rabble-rousing, Adams was an incredibly private person. He wrote under dozens of different pseudonyms, we never know quite where he was at any one time (except when he needed an alibi; we know exactly where he was during the Boston Tea Party), and he seldom signed his letters. He's like the Invisible Man: we can't see him directly, but we kind of know where he is and what he's doing by looking at the aftereffects.
As was the fashion at the time, most of Samuel Adams's subversive newspaper articles were written under pseudonyms. My favorite one was "Vindex"; the actual Vindex was a Roman general who rebelled against Nero, but I was heartily amused by how it sounds like you're saying "Windex" with a vampire accent.
The book spends about a chapter on Adams's early life and about a chapter on his later life. They're not the important part. Also his life after the Revolution is kind of sad; he was very good at rabble-rousing, but got kind of lost and fell out of favor when rabble-rousing was now counterproductive in our newly formed nation and everybody had the rights he was yelling about not having.
But the parts in the middle are not sad. They are in fact kind of funny, with how the royal governors despair of their inability to actually do anything about this one guy who they know, but cannot prove, keeps writing subversive essays and turning the town of Boston against them. And then the one time they try taking him out is foiled by Paul Revere.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, probably, for some violence.
4 stars.
Favorite lines:
If you read only the essays in the papers you might reasonably conclude that ancient Romans peopled eighteenth-century New England.
Page 159.
(Endnote: Von, two, three bottles of Vindex. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.)
