Go
 

  Get this audio book:




Learn More About
Find More Titles by
This Author: Stephen Budiansky
This Narrator: Robertson Dean
This Publisher: Tantor Audio

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas by Stephen Budiansky

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

by Stephen Budiansky


Title Details

Narrator
Publisher
 
Unabridged Edition
Running Time
16 Hrs. 38 Min.

Description

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. 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 61, 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.

Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky's definitive biography offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure, whose zest for life, wit, and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.


People Who Liked Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas Also Liked These Free Titles:
  The Story of Abraham Lincoln
by Mary A. Hamilton

  The Book of Baraka
by Ras Baraka