This interesting collection is a good example of the principle that the sum of the parts is sometimes greater than the whole. The somewhat peculiar title (cannot someone be both a patriot and a cosmopolitan?) suggests the problem here. It is compounded by the selection of a tinted version of the famous 1915 photograph of Mrs. Herbert Carpenter, dressed head to toe in white, leading a women's suffrage parade up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. This is an odd choice, for neither Mrs. Carpenter nor women's suffrage makes any significant appearance in the book.

However, the author has written four lively, elegant and thoughtful essays, but has failed to offer a convincing case as to why they ought to stand alone and together under a single title. The first of the four essays is a discussion that focusses on James Wilson's fascination with the pyramid as a symbol for American law and legal institutions as part of a broader study of Wilson's role in legal development. The second discusses a subject too often ignored in US history – the study of those who emigrated from the country. In this case it focusses on Elias Hill, who in 1871 led a party of 167 freedmen and -women from South Carolina to Liberia. That death rate from disease was about twenty per cent and at least thirty-six returned to the United States suggests this was not an unalloyed success, and Witt is unsparing about the realities and ironies of the Americo-Liberian experience. The third essay concerns Crystal Eastman and her early twentieth-century activities to protect American civil liberties that, inter alia, led to the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union. The importance of international law to her views suggests she is the only true cosmopolitan in the book, because the fourth essay described one of the oddest friendships in the history of American law: the relationship between Roscoe Pound, dean of the Harvard Law School, and the flamboyant plaintiff's lawyer Melvin Belli, often called the “King of Torts.” Witt argues that the friendship was born of the shared suspicion of the rise of the bureaucratic state in the mid-twentieth century. Pound feared this would threaten American liberty if it continued, and Belli feared it would threaten the livelihood of the plaintiffs' bar. They were founders of the American Trial Lawyers' Association, now a prominent and powerful lobbyist, but then seen as a political advocacy group.

Witt argues that he put this book together as a personal response to 9/11 and that the common theme is the irony of nationhood in the United States. While he shows irony on occasion in three pieces, it does not appear often enough to sustain itself as a motif. But this is not intended to be a major criticism, for whilst Witt's efforts to bridge these essays into a unit is not entirely successful, this elegant quartet will reward anyone interested in American history.