“A fresh new portrait of America’s second president,” the publisher announces, the most “well-rounded and multifaceted portrait of Adams to date.” Fresher than David McCullough’s engaging work, more multifaceted than Joseph J. Ellis’s? I began this biography wishing James Grant had situated his work in the context of other recent efforts to limn Adams, only to find he has written one of those biographies that captivates by sheer narrative force.

“John Adams: Party of One” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 544 pages, $30) begins with a dramatic scene: John Adams, former rebel and now the first American minister to Great Britain after the Revolutionary War, steels himself for an audience with George III. Mr. Grant sets the scene well, playing the earnest and stiff Adams against the magnanimous and even playful king.

This opening shows off what Mr. Grant does best: tell how human character collides with history. The biographer does not provide new information; he offers no novel interpretations of Adams’s politics or even of his personality. Yet the interaction of the individual and events, the connections between the everyday man and the historic role he is obliged to play, are engagingly evoked. Thus, “John Adams composed his thoughts on government to the accompaniment of a crying baby [his firstborn child].” Mr. Grant avoids the biographer’s tendency to explain too much, even when events would seem to call for interpretation. For example, when exactly did Adams begin to think of himself as a rebel? Mr. Grant pinpoints a moment:

So far from being a free and sovereign country was America at the close of 1765 that Adams, in his diary, could still refer to England as “home.” Yet he saw as clearly as anyone what the future held. On December 30, a day he had partially spent reading Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII,” he stepped into the character of Clarendon [an Adams pseudonym] and wrote a dozen or so lines to his adversary Pym [the pseudonym of a Tory pamphleteer]: “They are extremely proud of their country,” he wrote of America, “and they have reason to be so. Millions, Tens of Millions of Freeborn Subjects, are familiar with their Imaginations, and they have a pious Horror, of consenting to any Thing, which may intail slavery on their Posterity. They think that the Liberties of Mankind and the Glory of human Nature is in their Keeping. They know that Liberty has been skulking about in Corners from Creation, and has been hunted and persecuted in all Countries, by cruel Power. But they flatter them selves that America was designed by Providence for the Theatre, on which man was to make his true figure, on which science, Virtue, Liberty, Happiness and Glory were to exist in Peace.”

It was dawning on Adams that America was home.

Sometimes a biographer has to know when to get out of the way. Adams himself is such a powerful and grand writer that more than a sentence of commentary, in this instance, would be superfluous. Another splendid passage brought Lincoln to mind:

Adams lived cheek by jowl with his fellow man, highborn and low. Traveling the circuit, he rode and ate with friends and strangers. Such was the scarcity of suitable accommodations that he often slept with them. Posterity is lucky for it, as the experience deepened his understanding and enriched his writings, A pious landlady in Ipswich made him reach for his pen. “Terrible Things Sin causes,” he quoted her as saying, a sentiment she punctuated with sighs and groans.

Mr. Grant points out that Adams had a wonderful ear – aided by a precise memory – for human speech and dialogue. Of all our presidents, perhaps he alone could have been a great novelist. It strikes me that Adams wrote down what this woman said as if to treasure it – just the way a writer would.

At times, Adams seems like a character in a novel:

On the same evening he put up for the night at Goodhue’s, in Salem. A slave took his horse and told him his troubles. Adams listened through an alcohol-induced haze. He had taken cold in the morning and had drunk four glasses of wine to ward off the chill. He progressed to tea and built a fire in his room. There came on knock on his door. Joseph Barrell, an old neighbor, had checked into Goodhue’s. They would be sharing the bed.

The passage goes on to relate how the grieving Barrell talked to Adams about the loss of his wife. Adams quoted his friend’s words, including those Barrell’s wife had spoken just before she died. Adams wrote of the “Millions of Thoughts” the conversation had excited in him. “This Man’s Mournings have melted and softened me, beyond Measure.”

There are many such riveting scenes in Mr. Grant’s biography. He wants to present a subject who identified with his countrymen one-by-one. This kind of biographical detail suffuses Adams’s political principles with an intense poignancy. And saying little Mr. Grant has said much.

Don’t bother worrying about what is “new” in Mr. Grant’s biography. Don’t bother reading reviewers who question the need of another Adams biography. Just read Mr. Grant, whose perfect employment of details and anecdotes demonstrates what the romance of biography is all about.