PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewFirst Principles marks a departure for Ricks, a prizewinning journalist, the author of several works on contemporary military and national security affairs and a columnist for The Times Book Review. In this instructive new book, he offers a judicious account of the equivocal inheritance left to modern Americans by their 18th-century forebears ... Ricks concludes that the classically trained founders bequeathed us a mixed legacy. On the plus side, he commends the nation’s eventual extension of political rights to far more people than the landholding white male minority enfranchised in the Revolutionary era ... Ricks urges Americans to fix their government so that it protects citizens from the inevitable lapses of a fallible people and, perhaps, even more fallible leaders.
Paul Staiti
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewStaiti’s group portrait permits comparisons of the painters’ various paths to artistic accomplishment and reveals the mix of cooperation and competition that shaped their careers ... Staiti, in the end, is less concerned with the painters themselves than with the legacy of their prodigious talents.
