Adams mini-boom picking up steam

USA Today

The buttons are a publisher's promotion for David McCullough's best-selling biography "John Adams" (Simon & Schuster, $35), which is polishing the reputation of the overlooked second president and spurring new interest in the American Revolution.

And it's not the only book about that era that's drawing attention.

Out Tuesday, and likely to join McCullough on the best-seller list, was Jeff Shaara's novel, "Rise to Rebellion" (Ballantine, $26.95), whose main characters include John and Abigail Adams.

"What a wonderful couple," Shaara says. "It's one of the great love stories in American history — and it's true, not some made-up Hollywood soap opera."

The timing couldn't be better for Shaara, who began his book tour with a Fourth of July appearance on NBC's "Today" show. He's best known for "Gods and Generals" and "The Last Full Measure," two novels that completed the Civil War trilogy that began with his father's "The Killer Angels," winner of a Pulitzer in 1975.

His father, Michael Shaara, who died in 1988, "was the master of bad timing," says his son. "He finished 'The Killer Angels' at the end of the Vietnam War, when hardly anyone wanted to read about war, and absolutely no one wanted to read a book about generals."

Shaara, 49, says that began changing a decade ago with Ken Burns' documentary "The Civil War," and then the movie "Gettysburg," based on his father's novel.

"My generation had broke with our own history," he says. "It wasn't fashionable to be patriotic. History wasn't cool, especially military history. But as we got older, we began rediscovering our past."

He was drawn to the revolution by characters such as Abigail Adams, who, despite the lack of a formal education, "was a voracious reader, an independent woman not afraid to speak her mind."

He says he feels no competition with McCullough or Joseph Ellis, whose "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" (Knopf, $26) won this year's Pulitzer for history before disclosures that Ellis lied to students at Mount Holyoke College about serving in Vietnam.

He finds the popularity of one book often helps others, as his novels boosted sales of Civil War biographies.

A month after publication, McCullough's "John Adams" is in its 10th printing, with 650,000 copies, according to Simon & Schuster. Ellis' sales appear unaffected by his personal scandal. "Founding Brothers" is in its 15th printing, up to 258,000 copies, according to Knopf.

And crowds are growing at the Adams National Historical Site in Quincy, Mass., where Adams, the son of a modest farmer, was born and died. Attendance is up nearly 20 percent from last year.