Jefferson's Greatest Sentence

The first thing to note about Walter Isaacson's new book is its remarkable title: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. If you've forgotten that we're approaching the 250th anniversary of America's founding, you might assume that this is a book by a tweedy English professor-a dreary, pedantic treatise on "the sentence" as a literary artifact, complete with footnotes lamenting grammar's role in oppression and colonialism.