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 - Recommend to history buffsThis book certainly adds to my knowledge and understanding of colonial history. Cokie Roberts has added a useful dimension by concentrating on the women married to our early presidents and showing us, through the language of their letters that they were as courageous, politically astute, willing to sacrifice, and devoted to promoting the strength of our new nation as their husbands. I'm thinking of Dolley Madison and Louisa Adams (married to John Quincy) here.Portraits of other women are valuable, also, such as the young woman pioneer who literally walked over the mountains in the early 1800s to a new home in the Midwest. Rating:  - Ladies of LibertyIt is especially interesting to read this during an election year. How involved these early American women were in politics even though they could not yet vote! I listened to the audio book read by Cokie Roberts, the author. Rating: - Ladies of LibertyThis is an excellent review of history from women's viewpoints. The recearch was very well done and events factual. I felt as if I were reliving those times with the women who shaped them. Luisa Adams especially showed her mettle in very dificult situations as, of course, did Abigale and Dolley Madison! Thanks Cokie for bringing them to life for me. Rating:  - Two StarsI must be the only one who found Ladies of Liberty difficult to read. The ladies and their lives were very interesting or would have been but the way Cokie Roberts presented it. Jumping from one to another sometimes it would be on Abigail Adams and then jump without notice to another lady or it would go on several pages about a different set of ladies and then jump back to Abigail Adams which made it very hard for me to keep up let alone finish reading. It would have been easier and simpler and less messy to devote parts or chapters to one lady and then moved on to the next. It was messy and disconjointed and I gave up after a few chapters. If you like that style of written then you'll love this book. If not you won't. Rating: - The lesser knowns are more interestingNaturally, these seeds of women's liberation were, in fact, the passionate, intelligent, issue-focused women that Cokie Roberts presents to us. The book is a little confusing in its intentions; I had expected these ladies that Ms. Roberts documents to be solely five of the first first ladies of the United States (or in the case of Thomas Jefferson, key women of his family). And the chapter headings identify these rather well-known women: Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, Dolley Madison, Rosalie Stier Calvert, and Elizabeth Monroe. Roberts does spend a good deal of her conversation telling us what important roles these women played. [I particularly appreciate the writing of Abigail Adams, which Cokie's book serves to remind me of from my reading of John Adams.] But, in my humble opinion, the sadly-and-essentially unpromoted characteristic of Ladies of Liberty is its most important quality: its descriptions of several great 'ordinary' women of the early post-colonial period--some of whom achieved little notoriety and few of whom hobnobbed with big pols: ... For my complete review of this book and for other book and movie reviews, please visit my site [...] Brian Wright Copyright 2008
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