"There was a picture on the cover of the book of the 18th Century gentleman at the Constitutional Convention, and I've always been fascinated by how so long ago that people could have written a document that would have persisted for so long into the present.

There were only two members of the Constitutional Convention whose names I think most people would recognize today. There were George Washington, who was sort of elected the President of the Convention, and Benjamin Franklin, who was the oldest person there; he was a great compromiser, and he stayed in the background and still had a profound effect. But the book did go into the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the other members of the Convention as well who were lesser known, and the contributions they made, and in some cases the disasters that were headed off by not following their recommendations.

I was in awe of the whole process, the fact that it seemed in many ways so petty and mundane and repetitious; and there were some glaring mistakes, at least from our point of view today, one of which was the way they dealt with the issue of slavery. It does deal with the opposition to slavery, even among the southerners there. It didn't seem that there was anybody there who thought that slavery was basically good, but just about all of the southern representatives in the Convention thought that it was something that they had to defend and something that their constituents would not ratify unless they approved it.

I would recommend this book to anybody who's interested in the Constitution, interested in the democratic process, interested in American history. I'm gonna give it four start."

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