{"id":65577,"date":"2025-10-07T21:05:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T21:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/65577\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T21:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T21:05:08","slug":"book-reviews-we-the-people-a-history-of-the-u-s-constitution-and-will-there-ever-be-another-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/65577\/","title":{"rendered":"Book reviews: \u2018We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution\u2019 and \u2018Will There Ever Be Another You\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution\u2019 by Jill Lepore<\/p>\n

Jill Lepore\u2019s latest best seller \u201clands at the right moment, like a life buoy, as our ship of state takes on water,\u201d said Hamilton Cain in the Los Angeles Times. The lauded historian, prominent legal scholar, and New Yorker journalist has constructed a lively chronicle of the many attempts since 1791 to amend the U.S. Constitution, underscoring as she does so that America\u2019s founding document was intended to welcome, not stifle, well-considered revisions and refinements. The pages of the original Constitution sit under glass in Washington, D.C. But Lepore argues that the document should not be seen as akin to Moses\u2019 stone tablets, calling it \u201can explosion of ideas\u201d\u2014ideas that should both endure and evolve. Eventually, she attacks conservative thinkers of the past half century for spreading the notion that the Constitution is untouchable, thereby rendering America\u2019s divisions more intractable. Still, Lepore\u2019s 15th book is powered by vivid storytelling. It may be \u201cher best yet.\u201d <\/p>\n

Instead of focusing exclusively on the framers, Lepore tells the Constitution\u2019s story \u201cthrough the stories of a much wider variety of Americans,\u201d said Brooke Masters in the Financial Times. Only 27 amendments have been passed among the more than 20,000 that have been formally proposed across nearly 240 years, and Lepore trots forth many advocates whose causes were defeated, either temporarily or permanently. \u201cAbolitionists, prohibitionists, and advocates of Southern states\u2019 rights all have their moment in the spotlight,\u201d as does the last queen of Hawaii<\/a> and 1950s segregationist David Mays. Lepore doesn\u2019t mind that some bad ideas were barred from infiltrating the Constitution, but she considers it a tragedy that the framers made the obstacles to amendment stiffer than intended, forcing Americans on both the Left and Right to routinely turn to the courts for remedies. One result: the Dred Scott ruling that helped trigger the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Lepore shouldn\u2019t blame conservatives<\/a> for the death of the amendment process, said Christian Schneider in National Review. Yes, former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia popularized the commonsense idea that judges must be guided by the original intended meaning of the Constitution<\/a>\u2019s language. But Lepore provides \u201czero evidence\u201d that originalism explains the dearth of amendments since the voting age was lowered in 1971. In fact, \u201cit is more likely the very people advocating for a \u2018living Constitution\u2019 who have rendered the amendment process obsolete,\u201d relying as they do on judges to invent new rights. Lepore also refrains from recommending a better way forward, said The Economist. Though that\u2019s disappointing, \u201cWe the People is not a road map for repair.\u201d It\u2019s instead \u201can arresting chronicle of Americans striving\u2014if sometimes failing\u2014to remake their republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Will There Ever Be Another You\u2019 by Patricia Lockwood<\/p>\n

\u201cFew endeavors could be more paradoxical than writing a book<\/a> about being unable to write,\u201d said Laura Miller in Slate. But that\u2019s what Patricia Lockwood has attempted in her latest, a work of autofiction that chronicles a dizzying chapter of her life. Beginning in late 2020, the popular and acclaimed poet, memoirist, and novelist suffered a bout with long Covid<\/a> that plunged her into a brain fog and robbed her of her facility with words. The author of Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This seeks to capture that disorientation in Will There Ever Be Another You, \u201cand sometimes she does pull it off.\u201d She\u2019s also \u201cnever not funny.\u201d But the results, especially the early chapters, \u201ccan be pretty heavy sledding.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cTurning over the last page, I asked with pleasure, \u2018What was that?\u2019\u201d said Paul McAdory in NYMag.com. The book\u2019s Lockwood-like protagonist is sometimes referred to as \u201cI,\u201d and sometimes as \u201cshe,\u201d and most of the chapters \u201cdefy easy summary.\u201d Family crises collide with internet flotsam, time frames shift wildly, and Lockwood\u2019s stand-in sometimes sees things that aren\u2019t there. In one chapter, Lockwood\u2019s husband nearly dies from a freak gut condition, and the journey proves \u201cless consummately pleasurable, page by page, than No One.\u201d Still, it\u2019s \u201cstudded with passages of extreme beauty\u201d and \u201cexerts a maddening power.\u201d Ultimately, \u201cit is a kind of poetic mind virus, infecting the reader with its strange rhythms, its alien logics, its addled relation to time, and its ideas about the ever-evolving, ever-dissolving self.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Though Lockwood has remarked that she wrote the book while insane and edited it while sane, \u201cthe insanity has not been edited out,\u201d said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The novel is \u201coften best read as poetry,\u201d even as Lockwood writes of becoming interested in crystals, ingesting mushrooms that inspire a mad immersion in Anna Karenina, and managing the trappings of her growing literary fame, including being asked by Pamela Anderson<\/a> to ghostwrite the actress\u2019s memoir. The book \u201cfeels like a notebook dump and a fever dream,\u201d and \u201cI suspect it will divide her many readers.\u201d Even so, \u201cI can\u2019t help remaining committed to following Lockwood where she leads.\u201d<\/p>\n

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