Learned and long but never dry; it is, if anything, strenuously chatty. The historical set pieces have punch, and Amar imbues figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe with humanity and immediacy. Yet there is a feeling throughout of the lecturer playing to the back of the hall ... Digressive ... The complexities of 19th-century politics and, it appears, the capaciousness of Amar’s interests lead him afield from his central story line.
Sprawling ... The main goal of Amar’s narrative is to reclaim originalism as just as useful and inherent to liberalism as it is to conservatism, which lay readers may find a bit idiosyncratic and wearisome as Amar constantly returns to it. Still, it’s an elegantly written and thorough survey of America’s second founding.
