Biography, if it is done well, reveals to the reader the subject's times as well as the details of his life. Institutions are what men make them, and as men are influenced by their past and by their circumstances, any understanding of an institution's development must be made from a knowledge of the interplay of man and institution, society and man. These excellent biographies of two eighteenth-century presidents of Yale present a vivid picture of academic education and an insight into the social and intellectual world two centuries ago. The scene is at once antique and familiar; it is as though one were to find in a collection of Hanoverian portraits the face of a friend. Wars, student tumults, graffiti, “irrelevance” of curricula, desperate need for endowment, fights with the state legislature, all of this was as much a part of colonial and federal college life as it is in the current time. One finishes these two volumes endowed with a knowledge of the past and an insight into the present.