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The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero
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I Index Overall Rating
Readers
88/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Peter S. Canellos
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Date:
June 8, 2021
The sweeping biography of an American hero who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
What The Reviewers Say
In a new biography of Harlan, The Great Dissenter, Peter S. Canellos—an editor at Politico and the author of a biography of Ted Kennedy—says that Americans don’t yet fully appreciate this personal and political transformation, if they even recognize Harlan’s name at all.
Mr. Canellos rescues these cases from law-school casebooks and situates them in American history.
Although John Harlan is the book’s titular protagonist, Robert Harlan is its most intriguing character—on his own terms, not merely as a vehicle for understanding John’s conscience on race. The author’s affection for both men emerges in his writing, which at times edges close to excusing John’s less enlightened views (including his participation in unanimous opinions excluding Chinese Americans from equal standing). Still, overall this is a sensitive and smart excavation of two men’s entwined lives .. 'There are silences in American history,' Canellos writes in the book’s introduction. Hidden by one such silence is the truth about what happened to Black Americans in the years after Reconstruction.
A sympathetic and well-written new biography.
