Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on the American Constitution. It begins:
Alexander Hamilton wanted a monarchy; Benjamin Franklin wanted everyone to pray. Everyone wanted a government that would protect the rights of individuals; no one thought democracy anything but the greatest threat to liberty the country could face. Everyone in the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 had a different idea of what the new government should look like; everyone agreed that George Washington was the only proper choice to preside over their deliberations. Proving their decision right, he “lamented his want of better qualifications,” and “claimed the indulgence of the House towards the involuntary errors which his inexperience might occasion.”Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
During the nearly four months the Convention deliberated, Washington spoke only once, but ruled the Convention with a steady hand and an even gaze. The rules themselves were quite clear. When someone rose to speak they addressed Washington directly. While someone wasspeaking, no one was allowed to talk or read. When it was time to adjourn, everyone was to stand in their place “until the President shall pass him.” One rule was more important than all the others: everyone was sworn to absolute secrecy about the proceedings: “That nothing spoken in the House shall be printed, or otherwise published or communicated without leave.”
By agreeing to keep secret what was said in the Convention, no one had to worry what the public might think about what they said or how they voted. This did not mean that they did not want a permanent record of what they had done. They knew what they were doing and how it might change the world. James Madison determined “to preserve as far as I could an exact account of what might pass in the Convention.” He was not “unaware of the value of such a contribution to the fund of materials for the History of the Constitution on which would be staked the happiness of a people great even in its infancy, and possibly the cause of Liberty throughout the world.”
Six days a week for nearly four months, never absent even a single day and seldom absent for more than a fraction of an hour, Madison wrote down everything that was said, and did it at the same time he was taking a leading part in the very debate he was transcribing. It was, at the end, a perfect record, the most thorough report of its kind ever written. And no one...[read on]
Third reading: The Great Gatsby.
Third reading: Brave New World.
Third reading: Lord Jim.
Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.
Third Reading: Parade's End.
Third Reading: The Idiot.
Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.
Third Reading: Justine.
Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.
Third reading: Anna Karenina.
Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.
Third Reading: Emile.
Third Reading: War and Peace.
Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Third Reading: Bread and Wine.
Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.
Third reading: Eugene Onegin.
Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Third Reading: The Europeans.
Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.
Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.
Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.
Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.
Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.
Third Reading: Mansfield Park.
Third Reading: To Each His Own.
Third Reading: A Passage To India.
Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.
Third Reading: All The King’s Men.
Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.
Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.
Third Reading: Main Street.
Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.
Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.
Third Reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Third Reading: Fiction's Failure.
Third Reading: Hermann Hesse's Demian.
Third Reading: Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July.
Third Reading: Caesar’s Ghost.
Third reading: The American Constitution.
--Marshal Zeringue
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