...features at least four obvious typos, including the use of "it's" instead of "its" (my personal pet peeve) and a rogue comma in the Fifth Amendment that allows the government to steal your house (some say it's a rogue comma, others insist it's a smudge).
I'm not so sure about the conceit of the book, unfortunately. Bleyer doesn't do a great job of convincing us that he's taking his supposed "quest" to rewrite the Constitution very seriously. (And he shouldn't; it's a dumb quest.) The book drags on in places because of the narrative—you get the sense that if it were just about Bleyer riffing on the history of the Constitution, the book would be about a hundred pages shorter, and that that would work out for everyone's benefit. But Me the People is totally worth it for the anecdotes Bleyer relates throughout the book, especially the lunch he had with Supreme Court Justice Scalia, in which they argue about the merits of term limits for Supreme Court Justices. Despite some skimmable passages, Bleyer is a chatty, quick-witted guide to American history, and his book is a study of how The Constitution comes back to bite us in the asses every day. Bleyer's reading tonight at Town Hall (his reading was rescheduled from last week) and tickets are just $5.
2. Grant Cogswell, who was the subject of the book that became the not-very-good-but-locally filmed movie Grassroots, has a new poetry collection out. It's titled The Dream of the Cold War: Poems 1998–2008, and he reads at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight.
3. Find all the other readings going on in Seattle this summer in our readings calendar.
