The Second Greatest American

About the Book

The extraordinary wartime incident at Fort Stevens fascinates us. Pause for a minute and just think about it. A twenty-three-year-old American soldier screams at the president of the United States in the midst of a battle, calls him a damned fool, and gets him out of harm’s way. And then, with bullets whizzing by, they both proceed as if nothing unusual happened. All in a day’s work. Nothing special. No medal, no White House ceremony, no photo op. Nothing. What a scene! It is almost too fantastic, too dramatic to be real, too amazing to be true. A movie director like Steven Spielberg could do wonders with it. Imagine the cinematic possibilities. Daniel Day-Lewis could reprise his role as Lincoln, and Jake Gyllenhaal or Ryan Gosling could play the youthful Holmes. It would be a box office hit, a patriotic classic, and what Variety would call socko boffo.

About the Author

Daniel Kornstein is a lawyer at the Manhattan firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, LLP. A graduate of Yale Law School and a past president of the Law and Humanities Institute, he couples a busy law practice with writing. Kornstein has published eight other books and, in addition to legal journals, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and Baltimore Sun. His writing has been cited by a number of courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.