Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Lively and engaging.… [A]t 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.” – Jeffrey Rosen - Washington Post
“Budiansky’s account shines.” – Adam J. White - Wall Street Journal
“A lively, accessible book.” – Noah Feldman - New York Times Book Review
“Discriminating, genial, and admiring.” – Brenda Wineapple - Nation
“Especially consequential.… Budiansky’s is now the most engrossing of the major Holmes biographies.” – Lincoln Caplan - Harvard Magazine
“Superb…. A gracefully written narrative full of well-chosen detail.” – William P. LaPiana - Journal of American History
“The longevity and complexity of Holmes’s life and judicial philosophy present a formidable challenge to a biographer. Stephen Budiansky has met that challenge in distinguished fashion. Weaving together Holmes’s private and public lives with a clarity that reveals what had often seemed obscure in previous biographies, this book also shows how Holmes’s experience as a thrice-wounded Civil War officer subtly shaped his social and juridical ideas during the next seventy years.” – James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
“Stephen Budiansky’s Oliver Wendell Holmes portrays the ultimate giant of American law and intellectual history. In this stunningly researched and compellingly written biography Budiansky brings Holmes back to life. This is an astonishing look at what made our native jurisprudence genius tick. Highly recommended!” – Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of History, Rice University, and author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race
“A lively and informative portrait of the great justice.” – Robert C. Post, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Stephen Budiansky is a historian, biographer, and the author of Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas and Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Loudoun County, Virginia.

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