HENRY ADAMS: THE MIDDLE YEARS (514 pp.)Ernesf SamuelsBelknap-Harvard ($7.50).
The Education of Henry Adams is not the best place to learn about the education of Henry Adams. The "ironic hindsights" and "note of self-mockery" that dominate that famed autobiography were, in effect, argues Author Ernest Samuels, the verbal spitballs of old age that Adams was throwing at his teacher, life. In his projected three-volume study of the querulous Boston Brahmin of which Henry
Adams: The Middle Years is Volume II, Biographer Samuels, professor of English at Northwestern, is sifting out, with notably nonacademic...
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