A Country with No Name: Tales from the Constitution

In an imaginative and masterful work of history, Pulitzer Prize-winner Sebastian de Grazia has created two memorable characters. Nineteen-year-old Oliver Huggins is in for the tutorial of his life. For twelve afternoons, Claire St. John, a beguiling British graduate student, will reveal to him the untold story of American Constitutional history. Her means: the Socratic method. Her message: that the Constitution was itself unconstitutional, and that its authors' inability to choose a name for the republic muddied the document's meaning for the future ahead.

Through these tutorials de Grazia passes in review our most revered heroes--Jefferson, Washington, Marshall, Lincoln, and Thoreau--revealing the complexity of their characters. St. John's unsettling tales arouse more in her disciple than intellectual curiosity. Their relationship unrolls in so humorous and seductive a way that only a musty academic could object. Satirical, intelligent, and sure-handed, A Country with No Name combines history and literature, politics and law to reinvigorate our best traditions.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 02/22/1999
ISBN: 9780679744221
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.21lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.52w x 1.08d