If you ever find yourself looking for a really bad book to read to atone for something you did, pick up "The Supreme Court" by Chief Justice Rehnquist. There are only two reasons this book was published. The first is that the publisher was counting on name recognition and a solid topic (does it get loftier than the Supreme Court?) to bring in sales. The second is that the publisher just couldn't tell a sitting Supreme Court justice not only that he wasn't interested in the book, but that the author only has a limited grasp on how to put a book together.
The book layout starts chronologically: the Marshall court, then the Tanney Court. The Tanney Court chapter talks about how a Supreme Court can effectively work in commerce and regulations and how it can fail miserably by overreaching it's bounds in the Dred Scott Case. Then the book talks about 2 random judges, then then 3 random judges. Most of the information that the reader finds out here sounds like it was lifted from a pamphlet from the Visitor's Center.
Rehnquist decides that now would be a good time to throw in two chapters about the Steel Seizure Case then a couple of chapters about how he runs the court and what the typical day in the life of a justice is like and how he selects his law clerks.
The key insights in his book are that if a sentence takes up more than six lines of printed type it is too long. That's really something that Rehnquist tells us in his book. Even more pedantic, we learn that Rehnquist found it puzzling when he first became a justice that lawyers would come up to him and they would know his name but he would have forgotten theirs! He spends five pages telling us about how for a lawyer, this is his big day, a day in front of the court; for a justice it's just another day at work.
The last nugget that really rubbed me the wrong way was when he pulled the standard middle-school technique of starting a chapter with a "Webster's defines 'pack' as..." So what I've learned from this book isn't that the Justices are these magnanimous beings, but that they have shortcomings - unfortunately, one of Rehnquist's is that he's a horrible writer that has no respect for the intelligence of the common reader.
With such a bad book, you could imagine the way that the History Book Club meeting went. When I usually arrive fifteen minutes early, there are other members setting up tables or browsing the aisles for upcoming month's picks. Today, no one. Finally, the Dave, the head of the club shows up then one other member. We talk casually about how much we loathed the book and curse the person who picked it until we realize she hasn't even shown up yet. Fury glows in all of our eyes. Ten minutes late, the picker of this trash comes in and says, "so how was it? I didn't read it, I've been playing golf for the last three days." I'm speechless.
Fine, the meeting continues with the three readers. We say a few nice things then focus on the shortcomings of the book. Periodically, the lady will interject, "So what are you reading now" or "I don't understand how you can not support the war" or "All you ever hear about are the gays, but San Fransisco is one of the most beautiful cities." She actually said that.
I almost walked evey time she opened her mouth. And she didn't actually want to hear why anyone would have misgivings about the war or why Congress today doesn't have statesmen anymore, because as soon as someone would reply she would daze off into the distance until we started talking about the book again. If it was my first meeting, I told Dave, I'd never be back. Which is fitting because with my move to Chicago, I wouldn't be able to. It's too bad I'm leaving with a bad book under my belt and bad taste in my mouth because of partisan-spewing book club crashers.
