The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: A Country with No Name: Tales from the Constitution, Sebastian de Grazia

A Country with No Name: Tales from the Constitution

Sebastian de Grazia

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Publish Date: Feb 22nd, 1999
  • Pages: 432
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.50in - 5.52in - 1.08in - 1.21lb
  • EAN: 9780679744221
  • Categories: United States - GeneralHistorical - General

More books to explore

Book Cover for: Forging America: Volume One to 1877: A Continental History of the United States, Steven Hahn
Book Cover for: The Black Campus Movement: A History of Black Student Activism, Ibram X. Kendi
Book Cover for: Culinary Ephemera: An Illustrated History Volume 30, William Weaver
Book Cover for: Forging America: Volume Two Since 1863: A Continental History of the United States, Steven Hahn
Book Cover for: Voices of Freedom: A Documentary Reader, Eric Foner
Book Cover for: A New Promised Land: A History of Jews in America, Hasia Diner
Book Cover for: Crack, David Farber
Book Cover for: American History Now, Eric Foner
Book Cover for: Sources for Forging America Volume Two: A Continental History of the United States, Felicia Angeja Viator
Book Cover for: Scoundrels: Political Scandals in American History, J. Michael Martinez
Book Cover for: Voices of a People's History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition, Howard Zinn
Book Cover for: A People's History of the United States: Abridged Teaching Edition, Howard Zinn
Book Cover for: The Blood of Heaven, Kent Wascom
Book Cover for: Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation, Jon Meacham
Book Cover for: Sand Creek Massacre, Stan Hoig

About the Author

Sebastian de Grazia (1917-2001) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author from Chicago. His published works include A Country with No Name: Tales from the Constitution; Machiavelli in Hell; and Of Time, Work, and Leisure.

More books by Sebastian de Grazia

Book Cover for: Machiavelli in Hell: Pulitzer Prize Winner, Sebastian de Grazia