RaveThe Observer (UK)A beautiful and immensely sad book. The sheer amount of pain they each suffered – and inflicted on each other – is unimaginable ... More than a joint biography, as good as it is at that; it’s a deft and operatic interweaving of two outsized characters. In Steinberg’s telling, the pair are like twin planets that exert immense gravitational forces on each other ... Steinberg quotes extensively from conversations between them when she was visiting Mandela in prison. The quotes are powerful, intimate, disturbing. That troubling feeling comes from the fact that they are taken verbatim from transcripts prison guards secretly made of Mandela’s conversations.
Gordon S. Wood
RaveThe New York Times... masterly ... Power and Liberty is based on a series of lectures that Wood, a professor emeritus at Brown and a Pulitzer Prize winner, gave at Northwestern University in 2019 ... Can America be truly great if we are built on a foundation that includes slavery? [W]ood would say that while the Constitution contains that terrible defect, it also contains the cure for democracy’s wrongs — if we choose to use it.
Joseph J. Ellis
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... masterly ... [Ellis] deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America’s trajectory and ends with a historical cliffhanger: Would the Republic survive? It did, but only when the Constitution became the embodiment of The Cause.
