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mugsandmanuscripts's review
4.0
Nicely written. It has a bias, but I guess all books about politics do. Interesting and not at all boring.
librator's review
3.0
Not bad. Irons is interesting, and provides a lot of great vignettes of the cases, and particularly the people, that make up our Constitutional law. His legal knowledge and qualifications can't be denied. He is, however, not a historian, and his bias, like that of his mentor Howard Zinn, is open and overt. His heroes (particularly Earl Warren) loom large and change the country for the better, dying mourned and beloved, while his villains are usually consigned to mediocrity or dismissed with a phrase such as "He was rated a 'failure' by modern scholars." While my own views may correspond with his more often than not, he approaches history as a tool for his own use, and a way to prove the virtue of his teleological perspective. History should deal with the past on its own terms - reading our own values back to color the choices its participants made is something we all do, certainly, but that historians try to minimize as anachronistic. Kudos to Irons for taking on the task, for being a good read, and for providing one of the very few comprehensive histories out there, but I really wish he had worked harder to leave himself out of it.
wah38's review
2.0
This book very self-consciously imitates Howard zinn (zinn even writes the foreword). But it is not as much of a leftist reinterpretation of Supreme Court history as it would seem. You'd be better off reading a straightforward SCOTUS history: this book is just an odd mix of fundamental reimagining and comprehensive history.
avvid's review
3.0
I read the ebook version, and there were so many errors - typographical, punctuation, and spelling - that parts were almost unreadable. I wish I had noted the surname that was spelled so many different ways, I came away not even knowing what it was supposed to be in order to google it. I would characterize the editing process as “reckless”, or possibly just “none”. I felt like I was reading a first draft.
Ok. So aside from the assault on the reading experience, the book was well-researched, but maybe a little ambitious to condense into one volume. Some cases went on and on. The backstories of the justices and the politics behind their appointments were sometimes given short shrift as a result. This could have been a bit better.
Ok. So aside from the assault on the reading experience, the book was well-researched, but maybe a little ambitious to condense into one volume. Some cases went on and on. The backstories of the justices and the politics behind their appointments were sometimes given short shrift as a result. This could have been a bit better.
chrisiant's review
2.0
I gave this book a good try, I really think I did. And I still think I might go back and make an effort at reading the entirety of the book at some point. The main problem I had with it is that it's billed as a book about the people behind the most influential Supreme Court cases, which sounded fascinating: Plessy, Brown, Roe, Dred Scott, and all the other lesser known figures who were part of [b:making history|18490|Frankenstein|Mary Shelley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166956574s/18490.jpg|4836639], sometimes unwittingly or unwillingly. But 100 pages in (about when I quit) Irons was still analyzing the original make-up of the court, and the personalities of each justice and why they complained about having to be circuit riders. This was after 90 pages of analysis on the Constitutional Convention, highlighting the framers' lack of attention to Article 3 (the article that established the Supreme Court).
While I might well have read a book about the Constitutional Convention, it's not what I was expecting out of this book, and so by the time I arrived at the bit I was expecting, I was so bored with what I'd already slogged through that it held no interest for me anymore.
Like I said, maybe another time.
While I might well have read a book about the Constitutional Convention, it's not what I was expecting out of this book, and so by the time I arrived at the bit I was expecting, I was so bored with what I'd already slogged through that it held no interest for me anymore.
Like I said, maybe another time.
larryschwartz's review
5.0
Was my breakfast book, but was laid aside for some time. It's now the nighttime book and I still feel that I should be taking notes. Good supplementary reading for an undergraduate constitutional law course.