The Education of Henry Adams

96 KBPS, Unabridged, Read by David Colacci
 
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/education-of-henry-adams-henry-adams/1100011573?ean=9780679640103

Overview
Named by The Modern Library as the best non-fiction book of the 20th century, this autobiography plots Adams' own history against that of the U.S. during his lifetime. 

As a journalist, historian, and novelist born into a distinguished family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was inescapably a part of the American experience. The Education of Henry Adams recounts his own and the country's development from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905. The Civil War, economic expansion, and the growth of the United States are among its subjects, as well as his own 'dynamic theory of history.' An immediate bestseller, the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. It remains one of the most vital autobiographies ever published and is required reading in many liberal arts degree programs.

Writing from his unique perspective, Henry Adams turned a sharp eye on himself and the tumultuous age in which he lived.

New York Times Book Review
It is a book of unique richness, of unforgettable comment and challenging thought, a book delightful, whimsical, deep-thinking, suggestive, a book greatly worth the waiting for....Read the book as a whole.
—New York Times review, October 1918; Books of the Century

Meet the Author
Born in 1838 into one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Boston, a family which had produced two American presidents, Henry Adams had the opportunity to pursue a wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of his life. Functioning both in the world of practical men and afffairs (as a journalist and an assistant to his father, who was an American diplomat in Washinton and London), and in the world of ideas (as a prolific writer, the editor of the prestigious North American Review, and a professor of medieval, european, and American history at Harvard), Adams was one of the few men of his era who attempted to understand art, thought, culture, and history as one complex force field of interacting energies. His two masterworks in this dazzling effort are Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, published one after the other in 1904 and 1907. Taken together they may be read as Adams' spiritual autobiography—two monumental volumes in which he attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy, art, and literature in order to attempt to understand the individual's place in history and society. They constitute one of the greatest historical and philosophical meditations on the human condition in all of literature.