A "New York Times" book review Notable Book of the Year 1998

Nat Hentoff is one of America's most passionate and prominent 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. As the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan told Hentoff, Americans need to know how "American liberties were won - and what it takes to keep them alive". With characteristic eloquence, Hentoff covers the full range of American life in these inspiring profiles and stories about public and private heroes - Supreme Court Justices William Brennan and William O. Douglas, Dr. Kenneth Clark, and students, teachers, lawyers, and others who challenge assaults on the Bill of Rights.