BOOKS IN BRIEF The Votes That Counted How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election by Howard Gillman (University of Chicago Press, 280 pp., $27.50) There is no shortage of books on the case of Bush v. Gore. The Weekly Standard has already reviewed 11 of them in essays by Noemie Emery and David Tell, and we had hoped to escape any more. But the books keep coming. Among the recent crop is Howard Gillman’s “The Votes That Counted.” It is, as the title suggests, less heated than others on the topic. But like, for example, Alan Dershowitz’s Supreme Injustice, it condemns the majority’s decision as an indefensible act of political partisanship. That, of course, is the dominant view of the law professoriate. For a cogent assessment of the professoriate, one needs to read not a book but an article. In “The Professors and Bush v. Gore,” in the fall issue of the Wilson Quarterly, Peter Berkowitz and Benjamin Wittes focus on the views of three of the nation’s most eminent constitutional theorists–Bruce Ackerman, Cass Sunstein, and Ronald Dworkin–and show that each has made flamboyant assertions supported not by evidence and argument but by their own authority. The complaint that the decision amounted to gross politicking “may apply with more obvious justice to the accusers themselves than to the Court.” Berkowitz and Wittes don’t pass judgment on the ultimate correctness of the Court’s decision. Their burden is to argue that “the charge that the decision is indefensible is itself indefensible.” So is there anyone willing to say that the decision is not merely defensible but correct? Actually, yes. Read, in a forthcoming issue of the Cardozo Law Review, “The Unbearable Rightness of Bush v. Gore” by Nelson Lund, professor of law at George Mason University. Lund contends that the Supreme Court was “faced with a gross violation of law by a subordinate court” and “did exactly what an appellate court is supposed to do” in such a case–reverse the lower court and uphold the law. –Terry Eastland The Post’s New York compiled by Antonia Felix and the editors of the New York Post (HarperResource, 260 pp., $18) It’s a shame we have so many one-newspaper towns; American cities are big, beautiful, messy beasts, and it’s asking too much for one paper to capture the entire essence of any of them. Fortunately, New York doesn’t have this problem. As a counterpart to the Times, New York has its Post, America’s oldest continually published daily newspaper (and our NewsCorporation stablemate), to embody the city’s pugnacious spirit. This colorful volume takes us through 200 years of Post history, from its birth as the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton to the guilty pleasures that keep readers coming back for more: the gossip, and of course, the headlines, including everyone’s favorite, 1983’s HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. Along the way, the book offers a fascinating look at the changes and continuities of the Post and the city it chronicles. –Lee Bockhorn The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon translated by Wayne Ambler (Cornell University Press, 304 pp., $19.95) Xenophon’s Prince Republic and Empire in the Cyropaedia by Christopher Nadon (University of California Press, 198 pp., $38) Perhaps no scholarly achievement was more characteristic of the work of Leo Strauss than his rediscovery of Xenophon as a philosopher who deserved to be spoken of in the same company as Plato, Maimonides, and Machiavelli. The only major work of Xenophon of which Strauss did not publish an interpretation was “The Education of Cyrus.” These two volumes, by students of students of Strauss, help supply that defect. Wayne Ambler’s elegant translation deserves to become the standard English version of this work, which is the classic “mirror of princes.” And Christopher Nadon’s study is by far the best guide one can find to “The Education of Cyrus.” Nadon both shows the charms of a life led in Cyrus’ way and makes a powerful, Xenophontic case for that life’s inability to meet the highest interests of man. –Steve Lenzner
