A three-day cruise becomes a nightmare for a journalist traveling alongside the superrich in this paranoia-packed new thriller. Keira Knightley stars, playing a scribe who boards a billionaire’s yacht to cover a floating charity gathering. On the first night, she sees a body go overboard and believes she has witnessed a murder—only to be told that all passengers are accounted for and that she must have imagined it. Guy Pearce, Hannah Waddingham, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw co-star. Friday, Oct. 10, Netflix.

by Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore’s latest best seller “lands at the right moment, like a life buoy, as our ship of state takes on water,” said Hamilton Cain in the Los Angeles Times. The lauded historian, prominent legal scholar, and New Yorker journalist has constructed a lively chronicle of the many attempts since 1791 to amend the U.S. Constitution, underscoring as she does so that America’s founding document was intended to welcome, not stifle, well-considered revisions and refinements. The pages of the original Constitution sit under glass in Washington, D.C. But Lepore argues that the document should not be seen as akin to Moses’ stone tablets, calling it “an explosion of ideas”—ideas that should both endure and evolve. Eventually, she attacks conservative thinkers of the past half century for spreading the notion that the Constitution is untouchable, thereby rendering America’s divisions more intractable. Still, Lepore’s 15th book is powered by vivid storytelling. It may be “her best yet.” 

Instead of focusing exclusively on the framers, Lepore tells the Constitution’s story “through the stories of a much wider variety of Americans,” said Brooke Masters in the Financial Times. Only 27 amendments have been passed among the more than 20,000 that have been formally proposed across nearly 240 years, and Lepore trots forth many advocates whose causes were defeated, either temporarily or permanently. “Abolitionists, prohibitionists, and advocates of Southern states’ rights all have their moment in the spotlight,” as does the last queen of Hawaii and 1950s segregationist David Mays. Lepore doesn’t mind that some bad ideas were barred from infiltrating the Constitution, but she considers it a tragedy that the framers made the obstacles to amendment stiffer than intended, forcing Americans on both the Left and Right to routinely turn to the courts for remedies. One result: the Dred Scott ruling that helped trigger the Civil War.

Lepore shouldn’t blame conservatives for the death of the amendment process, said Christian Schneider in National Review. Yes, former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia popularized the commonsense idea that judges must be guided by the original intended meaning of the Constitution’s language. But Lepore provides “zero evidence” that originalism explains the dearth of amendments since the voting age was lowered in 1971. In fact, “it is more likely the very people advocating for a ‘living Constitution’ who have rendered the amendment process obsolete,” relying as they do on judges to invent new rights. Lepore also refrains from recommending a better way forward, said The Economist. Though that’s disappointing, “We the People is not a road map for repair.” It’s instead “an arresting chronicle of Americans striving—if sometimes failing—to remake their republic.”

The housewife who shot at President Ford

Sara Jane Moore was an unlikely assassin. She was a mother of five on her fourth husband by the time she took a sharp turn to radical activism, and then she became an FBI informant, spying on her fellow revolutionaries. But Moore didn’t tell the feds about her plans for the afternoon of Sept. 22, 1975, when she waited outside a San Francisco hotel for President Gerald Ford to emerge and greet a waiting crowd. Pulling out a .38-caliber revolver, she fired twice, the first shot missing by inches, the second going wide when a bystander deflected her arm. Moore was swarmed by Secret Service agents as Ford was hustled to safety; just 17 days earlier, a member of the Manson Family, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, had pointed a gun at him. Moore served 32 years for her crime yet offered no reason for her attempt on Ford’s life except vague thoughts of revolution. The president’s death “might have triggered the kind of chaos that could have started the upheaval of change,” she said at her sentencing. 

Born in Charleston, W.Va., Moore was “a bright, aloof child” who did well in school, said The Telegraph (U.K.). Yet she was eternally restless. After nursing school, she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps, but left for a marriage that lasted only months. She then married and divorced an Air Force captain with whom she had four children, and later married a third man she left while pregnant, heading for San Francisco and leaving her children in her parents’ care. There she was married again, to a doctor, but was soon “increasingly discontented.” The year before her assassination bid, she began working for People in Need, a free food program, said The Washington Post. She was “enthralled” by the “radical activists and their Marxist rhetoric.” The FBI said she had “furnished unsolicited information” on her new friends to the agency, which designated her a “potential security informant.” 

At her trial, Moore “was found legally sane by doctors” and was sentenced to life, said The New York Times. Paroled in 2007, she married a fifth time and lived quietly in North Carolina and Tennessee. Having said in 1982 that she regretted her missed shot at Ford because “I don’t like to be a failure,” Moore eventually expressed remorse. “I am very glad I did not succeed,” she said in 2007. “I was not thinking clearly.”