James Madison And The Struggle For The Bill Of Rights

This review is based on the audio version of this book.
To be totally honest, I only made it through the first 3 disks of this book.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this book was not well written.  The point was abundantly clear that there was much confusion after the initial constitutional convention about whether the Constitution should be ratified.  The book goes on to talk about this for at least 3 hours.  And brings up the same points over and over again.  I had to check to see if I had messed up and was listening to the same disk again.  Yes Madison was instrumental in creating the Constitution, he was even very important in getting it past Virginia, but it did get by, let's move on.

There were some interesting points in the first 3 disks.  I hadn't realized how large and powerful Virginia was in the early United States, geographically it extended into present day Ohio, not to mention the number of prominent politicians that called Virginia home.  Another was that the main point of contention with the Constitution was that it lacked the Bill of Rights.  The Anti-Federaiists where afraid that without those rights the federal government would impinge personal liberties.  Madison and others made the somewhat logical argument that since all personal liberties could not possibly be enumerated, some would be left off the list, and thereby possibly be considered unprotected.

Basically, after hearing the same arguments over and over in the first 3 disks, I jumped ahead to a random spot in the 7th disk.  The arguments that I heard there were almost identical to that in the 3rd.  No thank you.  I stopped listening.  I have other things I'd rather do that waste my time on a bad book.