(Source: W.W. Norton)
W.W. Norton is
publishing a new book on Oliver Wendell Holmes.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The extraordinary story of the U.S. Supreme
Court’s most influential justice.
Oliver Wendell Holmes twice escaped death as a
young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls missed his heart and
spinal cord by a fraction of an inch at the Battles of Ball’s Bluff and
Antietam. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn
for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity.
Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore
Roosevelt at age sixty-one, he served for nearly three decades, writing a
series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove
prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal
defendants, and ending the Court’s reactionary resistance to social and
economic reforms.
As a pioneering legal scholar, Holmes
revolutionized the understanding of common law by showing how the law always
evolved to meet the changing needs of society. As an enthusiastic friend and
indefatigable correspondent, he wrote thousands of personal letters brimming
with humorous philosophical insights, trenchant comments on the current scene,
and an abiding joy in fighting the good fight.
Drawing on many previously unpublished letters
and records, Stephen Budiansky’s definitive biography offers the fullest
portrait yet of this pivotal American figure, whose zest for life, wit, and
intellect left a profound legacy in law and Constitutional rights, and who was
an inspiring example of how to lead a meaningful life in a world of uncertainty
and upheaval.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Budiansky is a historian, author, and
journalist whose writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the
Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. A recipient of the Guggenheim
Fellowship, he resides in Loudoun County, Virginia.
More information here
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