by Michael Klarman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2016
A monumental project carried off to a high degree of excellence. Though it may be too lengthy for all but the most patient...
A magisterial history of the creation of the United States Constitution.
By 1787, the American union was on its last legs, bankrupt, unable to tax or to wield military or economic power, and effectively unable to reform itself. That year's Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was ostensibly intended to propose amendments to the governing Articles of Confederation. Instead, working in secret under the guidance of James Madison, the delegates quickly set out to overthrow the Articles and create a new, truly national government from scratch. The odds against the various interests represented agreeing on anything of substance were very long, and the odds against ratification of the result by 13 jealous states were longer still. In crisp, precise style, and without undue reverence for the framers or their handiwork, Klarman (Law/Harvard Univ.; From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage, 2012, etc.) explores in great depth, with ample illustrative quotations, the varying proposals and the heated arguments for and against them. Particularly striking are what a blank slate the framers started from and the proposals that were rejected, including term limits for congressmen and election of the president by state legislatures. The author explains how sectional and other rivalries drove the sometimes-unexpected compromises that made an acceptable draft possible. His descriptions of the political circumstances underlying the convention are thorough and helpful in understanding the delegates' contemporary concerns. Klarman also provides a lively account of the raw political maneuvering necessary to achieve ratification by a minimum of nine states from an electorate largely hostile to the enterprise, which created a much more powerful central government than expected, subordinated the role of the states, and insulated much of it from direct popular control.
A monumental project carried off to a high degree of excellence. Though it may be too lengthy for all but the most patient general reader, constitutional scholars will find this thorough and authoritative work indispensable reading.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-994203-9
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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