Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
American Epic

American Epic

Epps, Garrett

Hardcover

General LawGeneral Political ScienceUnited States Politics

Publisher Price: $36.99

ISBN10: 0199974748
ISBN13: 9780199974740
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Aug 26 2013
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.99 Width: 6.39 Depth: 9.45
Language: English
Awards: PROSE
In 1987, E.L. Doctorow celebrated the Constitution's bicentennial by reading it. It is five thousand words long but reads like fifty thousand, he said. Distinguished legal scholar Garrett Epps--himself an award-winning novelist--disagrees. It's about 7,500 words. And Doctorow missed a good deal of high rhetoric, many literary tropes, and even a trace of, if not wit, at least irony, he writes. Americans may venerate the Constitution, but all too seldom is it read.

In American Epic, Epps takes us through a complete reading of the Constitution--even the boring parts--to achieve an appreciation of its power and a holistic understanding of what it says. In this book he seeks not to provide a definitive interpretation, but to listen to the language and ponder its meaning. He draws on four modes of reading: scriptural, legal, lyric, and epic. The Constitution's first three words, for example, sound spiritual--but Epps finds them to be more aspirational than prayer-like. Prayers are addressed to someone . . . either an earthly king or a divine lord, and great care is taken to name the addressee. . . . This does the reverse. The speaker is 'the people, ' the words addressed to the world at large. He turns the Second Amendment into a poem to illuminate its ambiguity. He notices oddities and omissions. The Constitution lays out rules for presidential appointment of officers, for example, but not removal. Should the Senate approve each firing? Can it

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