Books: Frank Founding Father

THE ADAMS PAPERS (Volumes I to IV)—Edited by L. H. Bufterfield—Harvard University Press ($30).

On Nov. 18, 1755, an earthquake rumbled through Braintree, Mass. Shaken awake by the tremors, a 20-year-old schoolteacher was so impressed that he forthwith began a diary ("The house seemed to rock and reel"). These scratched words were the first of what was to become one of the great avalanches of words in U.S. history. The schoolteacher was John Adams, who became the U.S.'s first Vice President, its second President, and the patriarch of a remarkable clan of statesmen and historians that ranged from his son, John Quincy...