Print:5/28/2019 (W. W. Norton & Company, 592 pages, 9780393634723 [illustrated with photographs] ); Audio: 15/28/2019 (Tantor Media, 16 hrs. 38 min., 9781977354655) ; Feature Film: No.
Series:

MAIN CHARACTERS:
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Fanny Holmes

SUMMARY:
A sweeping portrayal of the life of Oliver Wendell Holmes from childhood, through college, the Civil War, his days as a lawyer, his days as a Massachusetts judge, and his days as a Supreme Court Justice. It includes many written opinions with commentary.

AUTHOR:
According to his website, Stephen Budiansky (March 3, 1957) “. . . is the author of eighteen books of biography, history, and science. In 2011 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts as a writer of general nonfiction.” He has a fascinating past, so I will quote more from his website:
“Stephen Budiansky grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated from Lexington High School. He received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Yale University in 1978 and a master of science degree in applied mathematics from Harvard the following year. From 1979 to 1982 he was a magazine editor and radio producer at the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C.; from 1982 to 1985 he was Washington correspondent and then Washington editor of the scientific journal Nature. After a year as a Congressional Fellow at the U.S. Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment, he joined the staff of U.S. News & World Report, where he worked for the next twelve years in a variety of writing and editing positions, including national security correspondent, foreign editor, and deputy editor.”

NARRATOR:
According to Goodreads, “Robertson Dean has recorded hundreds of audiobooks in most every genre. He's been nominated for several Audie Awards, won eight Earphones Awards, and was named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of 2010. He lives in Los Angeles, where he records books and acts in film, TV, and (especially) on stage.” He has a marvelous voice and delivery, seemingly particularly suited to this book.

GENRE:
Biography, law, history

LOCATIONS:
Massachusetts, D.C.
Philosophy, history, Civil War, law, Supreme Court Justices

EVALUATION:
Long, but quite good. It doesn’t paint Holmes as a Saint, but as a good, well-meaning, compassionate person (who maybe made a mistake here and there, some which he later realized, some not. It quotes landmark opinions that were often descents, but have since become the rule.

QUOTATION:
“As oft noted as the justice’s mental and physical vigor was his extraordinary embodiment of the sweep of history. As a Union officer in the Civil War he had barely escaped death at Ball’s Bluff and Antietam when musket balls tore through his chest and neck, missing heart, spine, and carotid artery by an eighth of an inch. He had spoken to Grant and shaken hands with Meade at the Battle of Spotsylvania, and seen Lincoln dodge enemy fire at Fort Stevens during Jubal Early’s raid on Washington. As a boy he knew Ralph Waldo Emerson as a family friend and dimly remembered Herman Melville, a summer neighbor, as ‘a rather gruff taciturn man’. Traveling Europe after the war, he climbed the Alps with Lesllie Stephen, better known to later generations as the father of Virginia Woolf; while in law school he became fast friends with Henry James and his brother William, soon to become, respectively, the novelist and philosopher of their generation. To Holmes they were ‘Harry’ and ‘Bill’. On visits to England he met the young Winston Churchill and the old Anthony Trollope; in Washington, Bertrand Russel stopped by more than once to talk philosophy.”

RATING:
This one gets a 5 for bringing Holmes to life, making me wish I knew him, and covering so much so eloquently while keeping it interesting.
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5762 Oliver Wendell Holmes A Life in War, Law, and Ideas By Stephen Budiansky (read 3 Nov 2021) This book, published in 2019, is an elegant work, telling in great detail Holmes' time and wounds in the Civil War, his time as a lawyer and judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and on the U.S. Supreme Court. He was born 8 March 1841, the son of the author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (read by me on 5 Dec 1944), and served in the Civil War from 1862 to 1865, was seriously wounded twice, practiced law till appointed to the Massachusetts high court, and in 1902 was appointed by Teddy Roosevelt to the United States Supreme Court, where he served till 1932. He died in 1935. This book gets better and better and by he time I finished it I was really finding it a most worthwhile book, Back on June 9, 1944, I read Catherine Drinker Bowen's biography of Holmes with much appreciation but since then I have gone to law school and therein not only learned of many of Holmes' fine opinions on the Court but also leaned of his flawed views, such as his horrendous opinion in Buck v. Bell, a case much admired by Hitler and now viewed as one of Holmes' worst decisions. But many of the dissents by Holmes have now become, fortunately, the majority view, especially in the areas of free speech and of legislative power. ( )

This is the best biography I have read since "Hemingway's Boat". Great read! ( )

In his life, he met Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR called on Justice Holmes at his home. Known as the "Great Dissenter," Justice Holmes frequently used his dissenting opinions as road maps to reversing many past inequalities. However, this great mind and brave heart, he was twice near mortally wounded during the Civil War, was also involved in some of the twentieth century's most heinous decisions. The best example Buck v Bell, Justice Holmes wrote the court's decision to allow compulsory sterilization of the "feeble-minded." Justice Holmes could be the poster-boy for the American Century, raised on the high ideals and aspirations of a democratic republic, but refusing to let go of much of the past's repugnant injustice. ( )