Common Sense in the Face of Fact

James Madison By Ralph Ketcham

Macmillan, 753 pp., $17.50 James Madison’s shining hour came in the summer of 1787 when he was 36 and earned for himself the right to be called “the Master-Builder of the Constitution.” Although he was to live for 49 more years, 26 of them at the center of things, the rest of his life seems one long anticlimax, perhaps the longest and most prominent anticlimax in American history.