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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

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.