Professions Books

Awakening Warrior is a must read for anyone interested in our military and national security. Challans explains how and where the US went wrong in thinking about combat, just war, military ethics, and military training. His unusual background includes experience as both an infantry officer and classically trained philosopher, so he is one of the few people capable of this level of analysis.

His book is a kind of manifesto that provides the philosophical grounding for revolutionizing how we recruit, educate, promote, organize, lead, administer, and operate our national security establishment.

I wonder why the Army has relegated Tim Challans to his current job in Kansas when it could have him at the right hand of decision makers in Washington. Then again, of late we've seen too many talented, intellectually gifted officers pushed to the far corners of the Homeland or out of the military altogether because they didn't seem loyal enough, religious enough, conservative enough, or obedient enough to endure the erosion of a military that they probably love.

A century from now, if we are unfortunate enough to still need armies, the military may be ready to hear what this book has to say.

_Awakening_Warrior_ is a provocative look at the ethics of warfare and a critique of the jingoistic warrior memes that currently substitute for a genuine moral culture in the military. It is worth a careful read. In fact, it should be on the Army Chief of Staff's reading list for field grade officers-- though it would be difficult for some to swallow whole. Nevertheless, the issues covered are crucial to the future of both our country and our corps of officers. There are ideas within that are worth talking about, arguing about, and pursuing.

Those who oppose the War on Terrorism and who are skeptical about the current administration's ethical rationale will find the book's tone agreeable. Others will find it a little off-putting (Chaplains will find it down-right shocking) up front and near the end, but they should stay tuned for frank and adequately supported reasoning behind its main themes.

Challans, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel who taught at West Point and The Command and General Staff College, is also a Kuk Sul Won Black Belt and Doctor of Philosophy. His qualities and qualifications rarely intersect in the officer ranks, and here they provide special insight.

He offers the reader an eclectic, behind the scenes critique of the current moral training that military members undergo. He goes on to describe a radical but conceivable alternative, emphasizing autonomy over the current mix of acronymism, unquestioning obedience to authority, and a hodgepodge of moral narratives, all of which currently take the place of a potential coherent system of education.

Thank the gods someone is finally critiquing the loathsome church-like culture our military has morphed into over the last 20 to 30 years. Professor Challans has written a scathing analysis that calls the bad-faith bluff of so many of the self-deceived leaders who have changed our military into a quasi-religious organization. If the Air Force's cloying advertisements on Armed Forces Network are any indication (the damn things sound word for word like some blathering god-awful prayer; NO KIDDING!!), then the US military has already prepared for the slide over the precipice into the abyss of theocracy. Professor Challans lays out in a systematic philosophical attack exactly how and why, logically, the US military has fallen into grave moral error in letting chaplains take over the teaching of ethics and how religion has suffused almost every detail in leadership theory and doctrine as it is currently practiced in the service. He also, in the process, unveils a supremely blistering critique of the Cheney administration and the formation of the mindset of an American Taliban, showing why America has headed down this path of assumed moral superiority that is in fact morally benighted. The moral affectations of Bush and crew will be the laughing stock of posterity if reason and logic have their say in the future, and Challans is the first real philosopher to show exactly why that will be the case. Highly recommended for everyone who wants to understand why there will be howling laughter in the classrooms of the future about our current era. Every officer of the US military who takes his or her oath to support and defend the US Constitution should read and digest what Challans says in this extended argument. They should do so to avoid being complicit in this nightmare of intellectual regression. The future freedom of our society may depend on people in the high places finally getting it, finally understanding why we are headed for disaster if we continue down this religious road.

The last thing this country needs is a military that thinks it is morally superior to everyone else because of their religion firstly, but for any other reason as well. It is dangerous for the democracy and it is dangerous for the world for any military to assume the ridiculous burden of moral rectitude. Witness the slaughter on 911 if you need further elucidation. Challans argues this point clearly and suggests the military begin systemic changes toward a principled method of ethics instruction, one derived mainly from a deontic perspective devoid of a substratum of apocalyptic metaphysics. He says chaplains need to get out of the ethics business and a system of principle should replace that of authority. Such a principled approach will help us avoid the problems of means/end confusion and is/ought conflation that have plagued the US military for so many years and have obsessed the poor and poorly educated.

Challans is significant in that he is a military insider who understands more than conventional academics what the military is all about and how they fail to inculcate any sense of moral autonomy. As a professional soldier (a highly decorated infantry officer) and a professional philosopher, his logic runs rough shod over the amoral mental meanderings of outsiders like neo-con guru Victor Davis Hanson, free-lancer Ralph Peters, and the other like-minded pundits who have no combat experience but favor torture and other relaxations of the rules of war.

The unfortunate irony here is that Challans will be ignored or attacked by people who think he represents some kind of misguided liberal agenda. His major critics will be those who cannot understand principle and will think it means something completely different. Challans supports reason only, but reason has become the enemy of those with a received world view (chaplains, romanticists, and the great mass of those in need of heteronomous authority). Ever since "faith based" made its way into the modern lexicon, there has been an increasing assault on reason in America as though it were a socialist plot. Challans has no liberal agenda. In fact reason, as he implies, is no friend of left wing extremism. The principles Challans suggests we embrace in reasoning about ethics are already embodied in the well-wrought judgments of those who enumerated the just war tradition as it exists in the Geneva and Hague Conventions. It is a sorry comment on America that we now represent a resistance to that body of thought.

As Bertrand Russell said, "Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid." Challans is recommending we engage in thought.

On the contrary, says Leo Katz: hard cases _expose_ bad law and force us to correct it. The flaws in apparently sound principles aren't always obvious when we apply them only to easy cases.

With this approach, Katz offers a book that is all but unique in the legal/philosophical literature, and one that should appeal to lawyers, law students, and nonlawyers alike. Bringing to bear a large quiverful of hypotheticals, thought experiments, and extreme cases (some real, some contrived, some purely fantastical), Katz puts common legal principles through their paces and shows us that our intuitions, while reliable in a general way, may not be as sound as they appear at first blush.

Katz's own area of expertise is criminal law, but he may have done the book a mild disservice in its subtitle: as he is himself well aware, the "conundrums" with which he deals -- What is the difference between an act and an omission? What does it mean to do something "intentionally"? What does it mean to say that something is the legal "cause" of something else? -- bear on many areas of the law, including (for example) contracts, torts, and wills.

They are also of general philosophical interest, of course, and Katz is himself a competent philosopher more or less in the "analytic" camp; indeed, his footnotes are as likely to cite Searle or Austin as to refer to a case. His discussions of e.g. tacit knowledge (a la Michael Polanyi) and judgment under uncertainty (a la the famous work of Kahneman and Tversky) are most gratifying and in each case will point the interested reader to a fascinating body of literature with which, probably, lawyers ought to be familiar. (For example, he does a nice job of tying the psychology of risk and uncertainty to the psychology of jury verdicts.)

And he is one of few writers who make (what I regard as) sound use of thought-experiments, which in the wrong hands (say, Rawls's) are merely tools for confusing oneself and others. Another writer with the right hands is Judith Jarvis Thomson -- and sure enough, Katz cites her well-known "Trolley Problem," for which see _Rights, Restitution and Risk_ and the additional discussion of the problem in _The Realm of Rights_. (By the way, Katz does not explicitly set out his own fundamental outlook but his overall approach to moral problems seems to be based on a sort of critical intuitionism not unlike Thomson's.)

The resulting volume is a thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating read. Law students in particular may want to read it as early as possible, as Katz's use of hypos is much like what we encounter in law school and will probably do more to galvanize the reader into "legal reasoning" than any ten other books on the topic. But it's suitable for a general readership.

It is also a fine corrective to the view that the law can be rendered clear and unambiguous by reliance on a handful of simple principles (e.g. by reducing all law to "property rights"). Katz is at pains to show -- I think successfully -- that no such program can hope to eliminate all vagueness or explicitly capture everything of intuitive relevance, and in at least one case ("proximate cause") he presents an entirely new argument showing why this is so.

Katz is also the author of _Ill-Gotten Gains_ and moreover has a nice essay in Dennis Patterson's _A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory_, another volume which is highly recommended (especially to law students). Katz's readers might also be interested in Patterson's _Law and Truth_, which in a way is complementary and "orthogonal" to the present work: Patterson is concerned with what it means for a proposition of law to be true, and Katz has a good deal to say that is relevant to this question.

Leo Katz, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, has a wonderful way of blending philosophy, history, sociology, and law together to present a compelling discussion about conundrums of law.

For example, suppose A is planning a desert trek, and B and C independently decide to kill A. B poisons the water in A's canteen. C, not knowing what B has done, drills a tiny hole in the canteen. A goes off to the desert and dies of thirst. Who killed A? After all, if C had not drilled the hole, A would have been poisoned to death.

Katz explores these and other issues with a very readable and witty style. One of the famous cases he discusses is Regina v. Dudley and Stephens, a famous (or infamous) case to all law students. Dudley, Stephens, and two others set off in a boat. Disaster struck, and they barely managed to get to a lifeboat; however, they had little food and no water. Days passed, and as they wondered if they could survive long enough to be rescued, Dudley suggested to Stephens that they kill the cabin boy, who was the weakest of the four, and eat him. The third person (Brooks) protested, but did take part in the eating when Dudley and Stephens did the killing. A couple of days later, they were rescued. Dudley and Stephens were prosecuted for murder and convicted. Should they have been? Did the desperation of their circumstances make it "necessary" for them to kill the cabin boy to survive?

These are very difficult questions and are largely unanswered, even in modern law, but Katz makes them worth thinking about, and he's very entertaining. Lawyers and non-lawyers should enjoy this book.

I was one of Leo Katz' students in the first criminal law course he taught following the publication of this book, at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. Very justifiably BA&GM was one of the required texts, as this book as as good a literary recreation of a professor's pedagogy as I have ever read. The book not only conveys Professor Katz' humor and intellectual curiosity, but also shows how brilliant he is to bring in subjects you might not at first consider germane to penal theory and law, but that afterwards you will not be able to think about criminal law *apart* from: analytic philosophy, "alternative history", the classics of American literature, and a host of fascinating stories from a variety of cultures and situations. You don't have to be a lawyer, or even interested in things criminal, to enjoy this book. It's one of those books that can change the way you think about situations in your life. Thoroughly recommended.

Beat the Players by Bob Nersesian, a Nevada lawyer who represents advantage players against the casinos, starts his preface with three stingingly dramatic words, "Nevada hates you...." - and the rest of the book attempts to prove why those three words have the ring of truth.

The casinos of Las Vegas, and by extension, the casinos throughout the United States have a love-hate relationship with their players. Most casino players don't realize this since most casino players are only thinking about one-half of the casino equation - the half they are on.

The casinos love the losers - who make up maybe 99.99+ percent of all the players, whose towering losses make casino gambling a multi-billion dollar industry - but the casinos hate the advantage players, those Davids who by skill and intellect have found ways to turn the tables on the casino Goliaths, beating those monstrous Goliaths at their own games. Goliaths don't like to lose to slingshot carrying Davids - that is for sure.

Nersesian's book goes through many of his cases, as well as other cases, where advantage players were mistreated and at times abused by casino security and even law enforcement personnel - even though these players were doing nothing illegal. Sadly casinos can ask players to stop playing and/or leave their properties even though the players are doing nothing illegal but the casino personnel are often not content to just do this - as the book brutally shows.

You'll read about phony charges of players cheating which are totally discredited by the security cameras; phony "eye-witness" reports that are totally discredited by the security cameras; and depositions where the security personnel and the police offer explanations that would be very funny in a National Lampoon movie, but are downright terrifying when you realize these are being made to hurt honest America citizens doing nothing wrong. Imagine a hero who fought for America in our wars; or one who rushed into the World Trade Center in New York after the terrorist attack to save those poor souls trapped therein, being told he can't play in an American casino because "you are too good" or, worse, being escorted to or being dragged into the "backroom" to be illegally detained. Disgraceful but it has happened - far too frequently.

The book is an eye-opener and a page-turner from start to finish. If you are a card counter, a shuffle tracker, a hole card catcher, or dice controller; even if you are only a smart casino gambler taking your best shot at the house - this book makes for enlightening and frightening reading.

Nersesian has done all of us who love to play the casino games a great service by showing us what has happened to some of our unfortunate fellows who have the temerity to be "too good."

Casinos use mathematics and intelligence in trying to beat the players. Their games are normally fair, but mathematically skewed so that they will win over the long run. Yet, may casinos abhor players that try to use their own intelligence and legal skills to win at the games of chance that the casinos offer. Some casinos take it way too far and illegally abuse these players. This is when attorney Bob Nersesian steps in. Nersesian represents players who are playing legally who have been unfairly and illegally treated by the casinos, casino security and possibly the police force as well. In Beat the Players, Nersesian writes about some of these situations and cases, many showcase the amazing stupidity of casino security forces and the police force. He also gives advice to players on how to act and what to expect in the casino security offices (the backroom), including when it is appropriate or inappropriate to use an alias. This book should be read by all smart gamblers simply to prepare themselves for what could happen.

This book should also be read by casino personnel and cops. Along with giving advice to players on their rights and what to expect, Nersesian also gives advice to the casinos and cops on what not to do and the misconceptions that they may have. Card counting is legal. Hole carding due to dealer's mistakes is legal. Abusing, illegally detaining and illegally searching patrons is not legal. In the short run, the bully casino security force may get some satisfaction, but in the long run, the casinos (and in these corporate days, their shareholders as well) suffer in paying out losses in court cases.

Although I am not a lawyer and much of this book deals with the law, I still found it very readable. This is due to the way Nersesian wrote the book. Anyone will find it readable and easy to understand. I recommend this book to all gamblers who play in casinos, and especially those that think they can win.

"The casino hates you."

That's the first sentence of the first chapter. Direct. Powerful. Compelling. Unambiguous. Authoritative. Easy to understand.

Just like the rest of the book.

This 320-page book should be read by everyone who patronizes, or is in any way associated with casinos in Las Vegas. A fascinating read by a Las Vegas attorney who is THE authority on the tactics and abuses casinos apply towards blackjack players they think is winning too much of "their" money.

The chapter titles are:

Your Money or Your Liberty;
Scary Cop Statements;
They'll Take Your Liberty Anyway;
Gaming Agents Speak;
The Take of the State;
Rules for Casino Patrons;
Gambling at the Legal Limits;
Cops Hate Card Counters;
Griffin Investigations;
Casinos Cheat With Impunity;
A Judicial and Government Overlay;
Finding a Nickel Brings Trouble;
Names and Aliases;
The Security Office and Surveillance Functions,
Casinos and Cops.

Learn your rights and what a casino can and cannot do to you and what you can do to do to protect yourself and substantiate your claims if you initiate a future lawsuit.

Learn of the cozy relationships between the casinos, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and the Las Vegas Metro Police Department.

If you work in casino management or security or Surveillance, the NGCB, or Metro, learn the law (!) and how to protect yourself from those pesky lawsuits.

It's all here. It's scary. It's real. You need to know it.

In The Bill Of Rights: A User's Guide, Linda Monk covers the history of the Bill of Rights, amendment by amendment, explaining how the Supreme Court has interpreted (and sometimes re-interpreted) each right. She also highlights the role of everyday citizens in enforcing these rights. Now in a completed updated third edition, the stories of ordinary people who made the Bill of Rights the living document it is today are engagingly presented. Of special note is the foreword by United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Highly recommended for personal, school, and community political science and constitutional studies collections.

This book is exactly what the title claims it is. It is easy to read and offers some brief but useful background on the English legal tradition which is handy for those wanting to probe the roots of the Bill of Rights. But what makes this book a success are its brilliantly simple explanations and enlightening illustrations (including a generous number of political cartoons) plus the actual words of people involved in key court cases. The User's Guide presents a winning formula for the ideal civics textbook. The lessons here are poignant, profound and memorable. Just what a teacher needs to cultivate a future of informed citizens. Buy this book!

This book leads you to the knolage of the bill of rightss and helps you understand

"A Black and White Case" provides a comprehensive history of affirmative action of value to anyone interested in race in America. As the subtitle ("How Affirmative Action Survived its Greatest legal Challenge") suggests, Stohr tends to favor the proponents of affirmative action. At the same time, however, he shows sympathy and insight into its opponents. For example, Stohr's portrait of Carl Cohen -- the Michigan philosophy professor who first unearthed Michigan's statistics on affirmative action -- reveals that the intellectuals behind the recent challenges come from backgrounds far from the mainstream of the conservative movement.

Stohr also presents an account of the Supreme Court that in many ways outshines that of Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's in The Brethren. In contrast to Woodward and Bernstein, Stohr lacks Woodward and Bernstein's instictive hostility to the Court's right wing.

Finally, Stohr does an admirable job tying together chacters and events covering a broad scope of time and space into a book with suprisingly strong narrative force. Shelby Foote once said that in writing, plot is the last thing that a writer masters, if he masters it at all. Stohr succeeds in this important respect.

This is an excellent book.

Whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, every student who has entered an American university over the past 50 years is a product of the affirmative action and diversity policies of our nation's education system. The U. of Michigan case that is the heart of "A Black and White Case" is a landmark ruling that impacts the admission policy of every U.S. university. The issues described in this book are extremely important to each of us as citizens. Everyone interested in the American higher education system sould read this book.

Greg Stohr provides an incredibly balanced account of the highly charged issue of race-based admissions policies. Mr. Stohr also does an excellent job of taking very complicated legal facts and analysis and turning them into a fast-moving story that non-legal scholars can follow and understand. This is the most important legal book I have read in several years. It is also a terrific read. I highly recommend this new author.

Stohr's book reminded me of an old television program hosted by Walter Cronkite. It reenacted significant events in history and he always ended it by saying, "You were there." I felt as though I had been behind the scenes as those involved with the two affirmative action cases worked for victory. Stohr explains the legal terms clearly without being condescending. He delves into the personalities and the politics which determine the outcomes. I especially enjoyed his coverage of the Supreme Court. Stohr is an excellent, fair minded reporter.

Having read NOTHING in business taxation prior to the final, I used this book to cram over the course of four days. Amazingly, I received a B, which was well above the median for the course. A nice feature of this book is the casebook table that shows which parts of the outline cover which pages in each of several leading casebooks. This made my unorganized cramming sessions much more manageable. My casebook reading was covered in 89 pages with this outline. Awesome.

If it wasn't for this outline, business tax would have killed my GPA and any chances for high honors. More significantly, I actually learned a lot from those four days and have applied the principles learned at my summer job. Good luck!

This is the most outstanding tax summary available in the market. I used it when I was first learning tax and still use it today as a quick reference when looking at an area I haven't seen in a while.

The explanations and footnotes are detailed enough for the experienced tax practitioner to use as a starting point or a refresher but sufficiently straightforward for the novice. Well worth the $26.50 - probably the best professional reference book I've purchased in my tax career.

My first copy was of the previous edition, I can't wait for the new edition to come in the mail! Highly recommended.

"The yellow book" cruised me through Partnership Tax and Corporate Tax by spoon-feeding me all relevant laws/doctrines in a clear, concise way. This is an amazing book, which was recommended to me by an LLM Tax graduate (now an attorney for the IRS) who told me that everyone in her LLM program used this book. Get the yellow book, trash your other tax textbooks-- it will make you a star.

I recently took estate and gift taxation and this book helped me more than any other supplement. It has great explanations and is easy to understand. I would definitely recommend this supplement to anyone taking a similar class.

I would never suggest to a law student that he or she altogether abandon his textbook in favor of a commercially-available supplement; that's why they call them "supplements" instead of "substitutes." However, to any student who finds him- or herself pressed for time with the final exam looming just days away, I might suggest that you can learn as much from this book in a couple of days as you are likely to learn from your $200 textbook in the course of a semester spent studying the estate and gift tax.

This book does a great job of staying on point, explaining challenging concepts in "regular person" language, discussing relevant cases only as necessary (without belaboring them), and providing realistic examples without digressing too far from the core subject matter. I didn't get the highest grade in the class as some other reviewers claim, but I went from completely confused to fairly confident in the subject matter in the space of about three days.

This black letter was a great supplement for my Estate and Gift Taxation class. It is very well organized. It also provides many examples on every topic which is great for exam preparation. I strictly used this black letter for exam prep and received the highest grade, so needless to say this book was the key to my success. I recommend this book to any student or anyone wishing to know the ins and outs of estate and gift taxation.

This is a gracefully-written biography of Bram Fischer, a South African lawyer who played a key role in the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1950s and '60s. In spite of his prominence in the Johannesburg bar, Fischer rejected the racist system that oppressed the majority black population. He joined the Communist Party, worked underground, and defended Nelson Mandela and other activists. Eventually, he was arrested and jailed during a crackdown on the Party. Unlike Mandela, who lived to see the collapse of apartheid, Fischer never entered the promised land: he died of cancer in 1975, at the high point of Afrikaner power. Nevertheless, his inclusive, tolerant approach to politics and his saintly personal example influenced a generation of ANC and Communist activists, helping to shape South Africa's current multiracial and democratic constitutional order. This lovely book is a moving testament to a lovely life. Although Clingman is a bit longwinded and uncritical, anyone interested in South African history will learn from and enjoy his tome. Law students and young lawyers should also read it. Six stars!

This biography chronicles the life of an inspiring Afrikaner who, breaking away from the privileges of his family's background, sacrificed everything for his cause. Fischer's spirited dedication to human rights should provide great insipiration to all those who have ever fought for civil rights. The true treasure in this book is Clingman's ability to see symbolism in even the smallest details of Fischer's life. What an invaluable gift this book is to the Fischer family and to South African history. Truly, this book is a fascinating read.

This book is a work of top class scholarship. But when, probably at 4:00am, you finally put it down you'll feel like you've been reading the most perceptive poetry or listening to the most beautiful music. Like the Pablo Neruda inspired debut Juluka album (Universal Men) it weaves a commitment to truth, a reverence for what's most nobel in the human spirit and a feel for tragedy and transcendence together with real wisdom and what can only be described as melody. And, although this book is written with the almost clinical economy of style that characterises J.M. Coetzee's work, there is a passionate undercurrent almost as intense as the more explicit passion of a writer like Frantz Fanon.

Bram Fischer, the Afrikaner Communist who is the subject of this book, was never as romantic a figure as Che Guevarra, Frederick Douglass or Steven Biko but Clingman is so aware of the drama and promise of everyday life that this book ends up being far more engaging than Jon Anderson's recent biography of Che Guevarra.

The book does have its flaws - for example Clingman's understanding of the South African black consciousness movement is poor - but in a strange way the flaws are part of what give this book its character. That's because this book is about struggle and the flaws make the reader aware of Clingman's stuggle to understand and explain Fischer and his country. So while you're reading about Fischers' struggles and South Africa's struggles and being inspired to think about other struggles Clingman's occassional slip ups make you aware of the author's struggle and leave you inspired by his tremendous, although not total, success.

This book is important and valuable in itself. It's also an important work of history which, given the extent to which apartheid and 'postapartheid' mimic the new world order (global apartheid?)is profoundly relevent to life in 1999.

Buy this book, immerse yourself in its riches until they become part of you, and you'll be a better person.

We used this textbook in our MBA level Business Law course. This book is an excellent resource for understanding business law from a corporate finance angle. The book is well organized and very useful as reference to any corporate manager or executive. I highly recommend it.

Dr. Cheesemen's thorough and direct explanations into the world of business law is phenomenal. He breaks down the wall and makes the law a whole lot easier to understand.

I had to purchase this text for a class...it is phenominal! I actually like reading all the cases and examples that bring the law back down to earth. It isn't hard to complete reading assignments and actually understand what you should be retaining as concepts.

C

I bought and read this book all the way back in 1983.
At the time I was most struck by its willingness to allege
that various Supreme Court decisions had been outrageous
MISinterpretations of the constitution. One normally associates
that view point with conservative "originalist" or "strict
construction" doctrine, but this book made -- a decade or
two ahead of its time, apparently -- that it was conservatives
who were ignoring the 9th amendment (rights retained by the
people despite not being enumerated in the constitution) and
the privileges&immunities clause. Today, Daniel Farber is
making the same case in "Retained by the People", and
Randy Barnett has come close in "Restoring the Lost Constitution".
Lurio was ahead of the both and far more accessible.

If only all learning were like this! This wonderful little book deserves to be a classic. If you're looking to learn about the Constitution or just brush up on it, "Cartoon Guide" is a hilarious and painless way to do it. (Or if you just want to have some fun.) The text is well-written and humorous, and the illustrations are uproarious. I believe the book would be appropriate as a text or at least a supplement for high school courses and basic college courses; if I were choosing a book on the Constitution for such a course, this would certainly be it.

The entire text of the constitution is included in this book with a serious cartoon narrative explaining both what is written and the historical reasons each portion of text was put into the constitution and its amendments. That history (including how we almost had a President Burr in 1800 and a President Tilden in 1876) helps making the constitution come alive. This is a good book both for people of all ages that need to learn about the constitution and for people who enjoy reading about a serious subject written with a light-hearted perspective.