Many scholars have recognized the [U.S. Civil] war’s critical influence on Holmes. Yet Budiansky, whose previous books include six on military history, renders Holmes’s war, and how it lodged in his psyche, as no writer has before ... More broadly, Budiansky’s is now the most engrossing of the major Holmes biographies. It vibrantly recounts the influence on his extraordinary public experiences of his extraordinary private ones ... Providing the fullest measure of Holmes’s life yet, Budiansky makes a sympathetic-to-Holmes and convincing case that the justice should not be dismissed based on the worst opinion he wrote.

Budiansky sets out to revive Holmes’s reputation and relevance as a model of intellectual humility for our polarized age. And his readable, lively and engaging biography is so successful that it persuaded me, a Holmes skeptic, to give the Yankee from Olympus a second look ... Today, when progressives, conservatives and libertarians are all turning to the courts to overturn the judgments of legislatures, and when Twitter mobs on the right and the left attack each other with the moralistic certainty that Holmes deplored, Holmes’s intellectual humility, and his willingness to question even his own deeply held premises are humbling and inspiring. And at a time when progressives and conservatives alike are so sure of their own premises that America is more polarized than at any time since the Civil War, the 'skeptical humility,' as Budiansky puts it, that Holmes took from the war seems more elusive, and more urgently needed, than ever.

Budiansky’s Oliver Wendell Holmes is a lively, accessible book, retelling the story of its subject’s life and work for a generation that knows Holmes was important but not why. Yet this biography suffers from its refusal to grapple with the stubborn fact that Holmes was, and remains, a deeply contradictory figure ... Budiansky’s biography...self-consciously rejects critical studies of the justice over the past 40 years in favor of a worship that can verge on apologetics ... Budiansky, a prolific historian and journalist, devotes more than 50 pages to Holmes’s Civil War career ... These pages are exciting and well written, their subject presumably more to Budiansky’s taste than the mere work of the law ... Budiansky’s playing down of the contradictions that make Holmes infuriating and interesting is particularly mystifying because he has dived into the sea of Holmes’s voluminous writings and even contributed to Holmes scholarship ... Budiansky also does a fine job of telling the story of Holmes’s gradual move to embracing free speech under the influence of Judge Learned Hand and the Harvard Law School professor Zechariah Chafee ... And if Budiansky can’t quite explain why Holmes, whose scholarship showed that judges make law, got famous for arguing that judges shouldn’t make constitutional law, that isn’t entirely the author’s fault. Contradiction is always hard to resolve.

What...is the value of yet another Holmes biography at a time when his jurisprudence seems so distant from ours? It is at once the strength and the flaw of Budiansky’s biography that it largely elides the question. As one of the few nonlawyers to write a Holmes biography, Budiansky is more interested in Holmes the man than Holmes the jurist ... Budiansky offers a visceral and page-turning account of Holmes at war ... Holmes is as distant from contemporary law in style as he is in substance. And if Budiansky is somewhat short on the latter point, he atones for it by amply showing that for Holmes as for all great writers, style and substance were in the end one and the same.

Not 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.

Here [in his account of Holmes's fighting in the Civil War] Mr. Budiansky’s account shines, especially his depiction of the Battle of Ball’s Bluff ... His reputation will benefit still further from Mr. Budiansky’s work, which interlaces insightful discussion of his jurisprudence with touching portraits of Holmes’s devotion to his wife, Fanny; famous friends like Louis Brandeis; and less famous friends ... Mr. Budiansky writes with admirable lucidity about Holmes’s life experience and general outlook, but he flinches from some of some of the darker implications of Holmes’s extreme judicial self-restraint ... Holmes wrote the majority opinion refusing to order Alabama to register 5,000 disenfranchised black voters. And in Buck v. Bell (1927), Holmes’s most infamous moment, the justice wrote the majority opinion refusing to find constitutional fault in a Virginia law requiring the sterilization of those found to be mentally defective ... Mr. Budiansky draws only a minimal connection between these cases and Holmes’s overall jurisprudence.

[Budiansky] takes on the life and works of legal scholar and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. with insight and panache ... paints a nuanced picture of this exceptionally influential judge ... the author makes a dry life of the mind into a lively life of a man, and a very appealing one at that ... it’s refreshing to be reminded of Holmes’s ideas, which shaped American legal thinking for more than half a century ... A winner from start to finish, this is a natural fit for anyone who enjoys history or biography.

A top-notch new biography ... Turning the influential judge’s life into a page-turner seems a highly difficult task, but journalist and historian Budiansky...succeeds admirably ... An entirely fascinating biography of one of America’s most important legal minds.

Historian and journalist Budiansky...delivers a well-crafted and accessible biography of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ... Budiansky illuminates Holmes’s life inside and outside the courtroom ... [Holmes's] letters from the front offer vivid, compelling descriptions of day-to-day horrors and insight into how the [U.S. Civil] war influenced his philosophy ... This wide-ranging examination of Holmes as an individual and of the law he helped make will appeal to those with an interest in constitutional law as well as to general readers.