chunk: Two aspects set The Education apart from the common run of autobiographies. First, it is narrated in the third person; second, it is frequently sarcastic and humorously self-critical.
  The Education repeatedly mentions two long-standing friends of Adams, the scientific explorer of the Far West, Clarence King, and the American diplomat, John Milton Hay.
  The Education does not discuss Adams's marriage, and the illness and 1885 suicide of his wife, Clover; it skips 20 years from 1872 to 1892. Adams, splendidily reflective and self-critical in so many other ways, did not articulate what, if anything, he had learned from these sobering experiences. He did, though, reference his marriage in indirect ways. For example, he lamented how the memorial he had constructed for his wife had become something of a tourist attraction. More generally, his outlook clearly changed after her death.