Young Patriots: The Remarkable Story of Two Men, Their Impossible Plan and the Revolution That Created the Constitution

This engaging if shallow history of the making of the Constitution salutes Madison and Hamilton as the leaders of a coterie of dynamic young men battling a sclerotic old guard to construct a vigorous national government. This interpretation is not quite borne out in the text. Hamilton played a secondary role, and the new Constitution was actually championed by such pillars of the old guard as George Washington, on whom the author lavishes much adulation. And there's the question of whether Madison's crafting of the Constitution, an undoubtedly masterful political balancing act, was quite the work of visionary genius the author considers it. Historian Cerami, author of the excellent Jefferson's Great Gamble, gives an astute rundown of the political antagonisms and compromises embedded in the Constitution, noting its accommodations to slavery, its uneasy truce between state and federal power, and the backwardness of an independent presidency in comparison with British-style parliamentary supremacy. But he avoids the kind of deeper critiques of the Constitution made by Dan Lazare and others who view its mechanisms as antiquated. With Cerami's reverence toward the "sacred relic," this book falls short of a trenchant analysis. Agent, Bob Silverstein for Quicksilver Books . (July 5)