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Title: Term-paper snoozefest
Review: These authors exhibit no real literary feel for any aspect of Vinson's life: his participation in New Deal era, his roots in eastern Kentucky, the Supreme Court, or the personality of the man himself. His years in Congress, for example, or covered with endless quotations from mundane Congressional speeches, and excerpts from unremarkable constituent correspondence. This is biography-as-term-paper, rather than as a transformative effort to place a vital human being in the context of place and time, as the best biographers try to do. (Wikipedia would do just as well, and at less length). Granted, Vinson is not among the more "exciting" figures of 20th century American history, but still he was a man who lived (and achieved power)at a dynamic time. You do not get to know this man in this book.
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