(Norton, 640 pages, $27.95)
It might surprise you that a book about a fleeting 1930s political battle could provide serious entertainment, said Richard Posner in The New Republic. But Jeff Shesol’s fat new account of President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed 1937 attempt to add up to six seats to the U.S. Supreme Court is both “splendid to read” and amazingly timely. President Obama, like FDR, is a liberal president with a healthy congressional majority and an ambitious agenda—and, like FDR, he’s faced with a Supreme Court that seems “more than willing” to oppose him, should the opportunity arise. Roosevelt’s outrageous solution was an attempt to water down the court’s conservative bloc by expanding the bench from nine judges to as many as 15. His “court-packing” gambit failed, but the threat did help save the New Deal, by spooking some of the court’s most conservative justices into stepping down.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Bill Clinton, for one, thinks FDR did the right thing, said Jonathan Alter in Newsweek. At a recent party for Shesol, Clinton said that if Obama wants to protect his health-reform programs against Supreme Court legal challenges, he should openly challenge the ideology of the current court majority. Dragging justices into a political battle, the logic goes, usually reduces their mystique. As in 1937, the nation today is engaged in a profound debate about the appropriate role of government in its citizens’ lives, said Casey Greenfield in TheDailyBeast.com. Shesol’s lively narrative gets to the heart of that debate better than any “dense treatise” ever could.
-
August 23 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include deficit dimness, steamroller-in-chief, and more
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”