Yankee From Olympus by Catherine Drinker Bowen is a 492-page hardcover published by Little, Brown and Company, first published in 1943, this copy published in 1972.  This is a book of the month club book.  The book is encased in a cloth bound hard case.  The dust jacket has some sun fading along the spine and light shelf wear.  Inside, the book is pristine, with clean unmarked pages and sound binding. 

Book Summary

Judges have not generally been fortunate with their biographers.  They tend to fall into the hands of either a legal scholar who, for all his appreciation of his subject's achievements, may be too dry and technical for the lay reader, or a sentimentalist without the necessary legal background who must make up in the dramatization of cases or personalities what he lacks in comprehension of the judge's trade.  

Catherine Drinker Bowen was well aware of this problem when she undertook her life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., She made no pretense of being a legal expert, and she did not claim to understand judicial opinions which have baffled even erudite lawyers, or that she had grasped even the essence of his sole textbook, The Common Law.  She saw that behind the scholar and the judge was a great man and a great personality.  What she decided to do was simply to make Holmes available to the general public not only as a jurist, but as a student, a soldier, a lawyer, a teacher, a philosopher, a letter writer, a son, husband, a friend--in short, as one of the greatest and most innately American of Americans.