Oliver Wendell Holmes
A Life in War, Law, and Ideas
The extraordinary story of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most influential justice. Oliver Wendell Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls missed his heart and spinal cord by a fraction of an inch at the Battles of Ball’s Bluff and Antietam. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age sixty-one, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court’s reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms. As a pioneering legal…
STEPHEN BUDIANSKY is the author of seventeen books about military history, intelligence and espionage, science, the natural world, and other subjects. His most recent books are Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union and Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel.
Budiansky's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times magazine and op-ed pages, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Economist, and many other publications. He is a member of the editorial board of Cryptologia, the scholarly journal of cryptology and intelligence history, and is on the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel. He lives on a small farm in Loudoun County, Virginia.
A Day in September
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Journey to the Edge of Reason
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Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Code Warriors
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Blackett's War
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Perilous Fight
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The Bloody Shirt
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Her Majesty's Spymaster
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