Jack Rakove

  • Speech Defects

    David K. Shipler has enjoyed an extraordinarily distinguished career as a journalist. His long service as an overseas reporter for the New York Times afforded him extended stays in the former Soviet Union and Israel. He’s written two prizewinning books, one on the penultimate period of Soviet history, the other on relations between Jews and Arabs in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. Since his retirement from the Times in 1988, Shipler has increasingly turned his attention to domestic ills (though his blog still covers foreign affairs). He now writes mainly on race relations, poverty, and the

  • Revolution Nine

    At first glance, The Oath seems to be a curious title for Jeffrey Toobin’s battlefield account of the current state of constitutional combat in the United States. Toobin opens his book with Greg Craig, President Obama’s first White House counsel, spending his first full day in office fretting whether it really mattered that US Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts had slightly misstated the presidential oath of office at the inauguration the day before. To those who knew the oath—as Roberts manifestly did—something did sound wrong when he stumbled over the proper placement of the word “