After James Madison’s death in 1836, the notes he had kept as secretary of the Constitutional Convention finally saw the light of day. That document chronicles the creation of what, to we who came later, would come to be viewed as secular scripture. But Mr. Madison’s notes record the angry arguments, veiled threats and desperate compromises that brought the American Constitution into being.
In A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mary Ann Glendon has performed a similar feat, telling the human story behind another piece of humanist holy writ. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has referred to it the “yardstick by which we measure human progress”; Nadine Gordimer called it “[T]he essential document, the touchstone, the creed of humanity that surely sums up all other creeds directing human behavior.”
