RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Second Founding reflects Foner’s rigorously researched, now mainstream view that Reconstruction was \'a massive experiment in interracial democracy\'; the changes wrought by the Civil War amendments were the product of decades of debate and so radical that they represented, in the words of one Republican leader, \'a constitutional revolution\' ... Foner’s authority and magnetism as a Bancroft- and Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar stem partly from his conviction that history is neither primarily about the past nor...\'simply a series of myths and inventions.\' The Second Founding reveals how an exemplary historian can plumb The Congressional Globe and other primary sources to capture the ideas and intentions of those who shaped the Civil War amendments. The result is scholarship that is disciplined, powerful and moving ... [an] important book ...
Stephen Budiansky
RaveHarvard MagazineMany scholars have recognized the [U.S. Civil] war’s critical influence on Holmes. Yet Budiansky, whose previous books include six on military history, renders Holmes’s war, and how it lodged in his psyche, as no writer has before ... More broadly, Budiansky’s is now the most engrossing of the major Holmes biographies. It vibrantly recounts the influence on his extraordinary public experiences of his extraordinary private ones ... Providing the fullest measure of Holmes’s life yet, Budiansky makes a sympathetic-to-Holmes and convincing case that the justice should not be dismissed based on the worst opinion he wrote.
James F. Simon
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...[an] enjoyably readable, thoroughly researched ninth book ... In Eisenhower vs. Warren, Simon answers three related questions: Why didn’t Eisenhower endorse the ruling in Brown? Could Eisenhower have made the South more receptive to desegregation of public schools if he had endorsed Brown? Why did Eisenhower become embittered about his chief justice, one of the court’s most influential? ... Simon builds an absorbing book about a saga in American law and politics that remains centrally important.
