Still, there is always room on the bookshelf for another well-written book on this overlooked and under-appreciated president. And just this past January, Phyllis Lee Levin’s book, The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams, hit the shelves. In May of last year, Fred Kaplan released his biography of the sixth President of the United States, titled, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, to a warm reception. Yet recently, it looks like John Quincy is getting his due. They never quite measure up in our minds and in our hearts. President?” It is always, it seems, this way with sequels. President had a son who also became a U.S. Thus, many of us only know John Quincy as a sequel, a trivial pursuit question: “Which eighteenth-century U.S. David McCullough’s wonderful biography of John Adams, which was turned into a popular HBO series, cemented the founding father’s stature in the collective American conscience. But unfortunately for John Quincy Adams, his father has seemed to eclipse him in many ways. The word “fascinating” doesn’t begin to describe this man.

President ever to live in the White House? Or that he wrote in a journal every day - totaling some 17,000 pages and 51 volumes - since he was twelve until the day he died on the floor of Congress in 1848? Who knew that John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) was so interesting? Or that he was probably the most sleep deprived and crankiest U.S. Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic.

Nation Builder by Charles N. Edel