Living the Bill of Rights

the long version

Nat Hentoff is one of America's foremost and most passionate writers about civil liberties and civil rights. In Living the Bill of Rights, he has taken what is too often thought of as an abstract issue and enlivened it by focusing on representative individuals for whom the Constitution is a vital part of life. Hentoff covers the full range of American life in these inspiring and moving profiles and stories and portrays such fighters for the Bill of Rights as a high school senior in Tennessee who is a born-again Christian; a black Texas lawyer fired by the local NAACP for representing a Klan wizard on constitutional grounds; Justice William Brennan himself; another Supreme Court justice, William O. Douglas, the preeminent supporter of the individual against the government; and a professional basketball star who, for religious reasons, would not participate in a display of mass loyalty to the American flag. In Living the Bill of Rights, Hentoff illuminates the basic necessity - and fragility - of our rights and liberties.