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Recently completed reading (well, skimming might be the more accurate word for my perusal of a number of these pages) Samuel Adams: A Life, by Ira Stoll.

Given the many books about John and Abigail Adams (and two blockbuster miniseries produced by PBS and HBO) I was interested to learn more about John's famous cousin. Alas, this volume is not the best book to turn to in order to learn about this astonishingly capable revolutionary.

One major obstacle is the decision by Samuel Adams and his spouse Elizabeth Wells Adams to regularly burn their personal correspondence as soon as possible after reading. This places the biographer at a great disadvantage when it comes to discussing their marital and family life.

This profound obstacle begets another, which is reliance on the existing public writings of Adams, who was a newspaperman and a wordsmith at least as competent as peers such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and his cousin John Adams, but who exhaustively focused on two themes during his lifetime as a polemicist.

One, the enormous importance of religion in the public and private sectors of daily life in colonial Boston and the state of Massachusetts. Two, the need to fully separate from Great Britain, the sooner the better. Adams was one of the first, if not the first, to begin beating this prophetic drum, for which he deserves immense credit.

However, the generous and overly enthusiastic use of this material bombards the reader page after page with excerpts highly similar in tone, style, phrasing and content. Although Adams modestly modified a few of his core beliefs over time (e.g., eventually becoming a bit more tolerant of Roman Catholics and Quakers), this thematic repetition very quickly became very tedious to this reader.