PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksNot since Mark DeWolfe Howe’s two-volume (but unfinished) biography, The Proving Years and The Shaping Years, has any author so ably rendered Holmes’s wartime service ... Budiansky skillfully summarizes Holmes’s almost 30-year tenure on the US Supreme Court, the era for which he is best known ... Budiansky might have avoided occasional lapses had he consulted the academics he seems to despise ... The fact that Budiansky never mentions some of the most interesting researchers working on Holmes—Susan Haack, Seth Vannatta, and Catharine Wells come to mind—suggests willful ignorance, the deliberate avoidance of the latest scholarship. But to what end? ... Budiansky recognizes, as others haven’t, that Holmes was large and contained multitudes.
