MixedThe National Review...this isn’t weighty legal scholarship or a thorough biography. It is, rather, a potboiler, briskly surveying how our founding charter went missing, what impelled Justice Thomas to go looking for it, and what he unearthed ... Magnet presents paternalism, condescension, and a spirit of victimization as Thomas’s nemeses. He pulls no punches about the sneering critics along Thomas’s path ... The searing experience of the Anita Hill hearings is covered, not in dispassionate forensic detail but rather with a polemical recounting of the reasons Thomas’s partisans found Hill’s account so implausible. It won’t be a satisfying rebuttal for those inclined to believe Hill ... Magnet’s book goes astray when he parts company with his subject ... Magnet spends pages of his concluding chapter contrasting Thomas’s upbringing and worldview with those of Barack Obama. An interesting parallel can be drawn ... But the contrast has little to do with Thomas’s thinking about the Constitution and seems forced into a book on the subject.
