John Marshall

"As Brookhiser shows in this brisk biography, Marshall's success was partly due to the power of his legal reasoning and partly to his brilliant management of the men who served with him on the Supreme Court...Marshall would doubtless be pleased that it is his ideas that dominate this biography, not his quarrels, debts, ambitions, or amours."

"In Brookhiser's short and captivating biography, Marshall emerges as the institution's first great partisan operative.... The career of the great chief justice continues to this day to calibrate our expectations for the court."

"Mr. Brookhiser explains [Marshall's] decisions, and the disputes that gave rise to them, with the clarity and verve that we have come to expect from his lapidary historical portraits...[A] fine book."

"As Richard Brookhiser's fine new biography makes clear, the polarization of the age of Marshall matched (or even surpassed) our current battles over the composition of the Supreme Court...[A] balanced account."

"Marshall's...sphinx-like quality has proved tempting to biographers, and Brookhiser's volume is the third to appear since the beginning of 2016. It is also the first that is genuinely satisfying.... Elegant and readable."

"Entertaining and instructive...Brookhiser brings to vivid life the gaudy facts and seamy characters behind such great cases as Dartmouth College and McCulloch."

"Informative without being dull, thesis-driven without being argumentative...Another good entry in the good series of works on the Founders that Brookhiser has been giving us all these years."

"Full of wisdom."

"A concise, informative, and at times entertaining biography of our nation's fourth chief justice."

"Richard Brookhiser brings his deep knowledge of the American founding, his appreciation for history's crisscrossing patterns, and his signature minimalist style to America's greatest chief justice. His book is also timely. For John Marshall's seminal conviction was that we were a single people, and that government was not 'them' but 'us.'"

"Richard Brookhiser is a master of the interpretive biography, and his incisive portrait of John Marshall couldn't be more timely. The Supreme Court stands at the middle of the American political arena, and Marshall is the man who put it there."

"Brookhiser's John Marshall is an erudite and elegant tour through not only the great chief justice's life, but the beginnings of the United States and the nation's Supreme Court. With colorful portraits of members of the founding generation, and clear and insightful descriptions of the legal cases that that shaped the American legal system, this book is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on the Early American Republic."