Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. No review was required in return for an advance reading copy and no review was promised.

Mr. Book just finished The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding, by William Hogeland.

The book started off with very high hopes. The author peaked my interest when he described what the book was going to be about. But, then hopes once I got into the body of the book.

This was not a well written book and for most of it, the book struggled to keep my interest. What should have been interesting material in the hands of another author just failed.

I was hoping that things would have turned around with the chapter on the Constitutional Convention. That was really the only high point of the book. My hopes that it would be the turning point were quickly dashed.

It took me a while to figure out why this Herman Husband character gets so much attention to the book. To those who are already familiar with Hamilton and are wondering who is this guy, I have to say you’re right. There’s a reason why, in his long masterpiece on Hamilton, Ron Chernow devoted a grand total of zero words to Herman Husband. The only explanation that I could come up with was Husband’s inclusion allowed the author to get gratuitous religious imagery included a few times.

There were a bunch of times throughout the book when I was tempted to give up and stop reading. But, I kept plowing through, hoping it would improve. Unfortunately, the author was unable to make the material as interesting as it should have been.

I’m going to have to give this one a D. If the theses of the book was supposed to be that people have been wrong for over 200 years and Alexander Hamilton really had a very boring life, then the book would have succeeded on that front. But, that was not the case. Instead, we get a book that should have been very good in the hands of a capable author, but not in this one.

Before starting this book, I saw in my records that I had read Hogeland’s book, Declaration: The Nine Tumultougs Weeks When America Became Independent May 1-July 4, 1776, back on August 7, 2010. But, I have an X listed in the column for grade, since it was back in days when I had just been recording when I read books and was not giving them grades.

With a title like that, I would definitely have wanted to reread it and find out what the grade should be. But, after reading this Hamilton book, I have no confidence in this author’s ability to meet the low-hanging fruit of writing a good book when you have such a great topic to write about. So, it did not take me long to decide that that was not going to be one that I would want to reread.

Amazon, Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a D equates to 1 star. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews. It will also be posted at Amazon, as soon as the book is released to the public on May 28.

Mr. Book originally finished reading this on May 27, 2024.

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