RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksAmar criticizes Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Calhoun, and Jackson, among other leading politicians, and stakes out a distinctive position among the Constitution’s many interpreters. This alone justifies the book ... The work, with its comprehensive scope, incisive analysis, and storyteller’s gifts, is frequently provocative and sweeping in its simultaneous grasp of politics and law. The great strength of The Words That Made Us is to place constitutional history in a geostrategic context ... Amar persuasively documents that the Americanization of the Colonies was enabled by the newspapers of the day, which helped nationalize dissent ... Amar’s distinctive contribution in this book is to recognize how corrosive the Three-Fifths compromise proved to be ... Amar’s use of biography and narrative history brings these stories to life. For Amar at his best, context is the key to retelling his account of the American constitutional conversation ... In one instance, Amar’s contextualism fails him. Amar’s discussion of President Jackson’s 1832 veto of the Act to Renew the Charter of the Second Bank of the United States is narrow and legalistic.
James F. Simon
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksEisenhower vs. Warren...is a well-paced, balanced account of two remarkable men and their conflict over public school integration and treatment of \'subversives\' during the 1950s and 1960s. Simon, however, leaves a major historical question unaddressed ... The unaddressed historical question in Simon’s book is the counterfactual: would our nation have been better off if both the Court and President Eisenhower had been more willing to confront racism when Brown was decided? ... Simon provides useful insights both into the competing views of the two most consequential leaders during the 1950s who were responsible for our nation’s initial desegregation practices and into the complexity of the process of beginning to unravel the \'American Dilemma,\' as Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish Nobel Laureate economist, called our race relations. But he doesn’t directly address the ultimate question of whether there would have been a better way to proceed.
