Akhil Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography succeeds in its aim of providing the general reader with an introduction to the constitutional text and the political concerns that led to that text. Readers will gain a new appreciation of the intricacy of the constitutional design and its value as an instrument of democratic politics. Constitutional realists will be left wondering, however, whether a biography that focuses so closely on the birth of the document misses too much of the real constitutional drama, its growth and development through later contestation, interpretation and practice.