
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a moment many Americans believed would bring suffrage to all. But, as this book depicts, the Act signaled both heroic accomplishments and heartbreaking setbacks in the efforts to allow all the right to vote. Berman approaches his topic as if it were a crime novel. While working in legal terms and court decisions, his focus on the individuals—both those who thwarted and those who fostered the law—is what holds the reader’s attention. Moreover, political figures who tried to achieve one result often, ironically, achieved the opposite.