Houses of the Presidents: Childhood Homes, Family Dwellings, Private Escapes, and Grand Estates

This book has not only stunning photos and info about the houses, but also tons of history. It's like "If Walls Could Talk" for all of our founding fathers' homes. Family life, politics, business, & more went on in these homes, and this book delves into all of it. However, it does ignore the slavery issue, since it isn't PC to be reminded that most wealthy landowners, North & South, had slaves; including the founders.

Houses of the Founding Fathers This book is long overdue, and well worth the wait. The photographs and text, along with the history tidbits interwoven throughout give a real sense of the life and times of those men and women who created our country. The authors have gone beyond presenting the basic architecture styles to bring us into the everyday aspects of life of our Founding Fathers and their families. The perspectives and lighting of the photographs make us believe that 'we are there'. The authors have obviously done their research and made this book easy to follow with timelines, facts, features, and explanations of how the houses came into being in the first place - and how they have fared over the past two centuries. For anyone interested in American History - this book is for you!

One of my favorite pleasures is visiting historic homes. Nothing gives you a sense of history and biography like entering the dining room or bedroom of the house of an historical figure and examining family portraits, admiring classical moldings, and peering through wavy eighteenth-century window panes at a garden topiary below. Aside from visitng old homes, the next best thing is paging through collections of them such as those found in this handsome volume by Hugh Howard and photographer Roger Straus III. The authors have visited the homes of forty of the luminaries of eighteenth-century America and given us not only magnificent color photos of the interiors and exteriors of these houses, but Howard has written elegant summaries of the owners' lives, their political importance, and their domestic architectural tastes. What is unusual about Howard and Straus' effort is the range of selection. There are the expected chapters on Mount Vernon, Monticello, and the homes of the Lees and Randolphs of Virginia, but the book also includes the residences of more obscure members of the nation's founders such as Benjamin Chew of Pennsylvania, William Paca of Maryland, and William Whipple of New Hampshire, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. This is not only a book for the coffee table, but one to be read with appetite and consulted on your next trip to America's historic homes.

Much more than a coffee table book, it has superb pix, great stories with each house, and architectural detail as well. Many great interiro shots of rooms, etc. For the heft, quality, pix and presentation, the price is WELL worth it. Highly recommended.