I tend to be an "actions speak louder than works" kind of person. I think that, had the outcome of the war been different, maybe this speech would have meant nothing. I am not wholly convinced by his thesis that this one, very short speech totally changed most people's outlook on the constitution....
This is an excellent book by Wills which could easily be kept on the shelf for easy reference. Wills has a conversational style to his writing, and he suffers no fools so he is interesting in what he has to say. He does a good job of laying out some of the basic teachings of Paul and dispelling mis-...
I had to put this book down for several months - because I had to digest certain arguments (especially in Part IV) -- that went against long-standing views of mine, but are so brilliantly argued, that I simply couldn't go on until they had been simmered, stewed, and thoroughly digested. Wills is one...
As with Karen Armstrong's Buddha (review: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2199695.Buddha), I can't do justice to Garry Wills' biography of Augustine of Hippo because I listened to it via audio cassette as I drove to and from work.I will say this, despite its brevity (less than 200 pages in print)...
Wills decries our ignorance of Henry Adams great history of the early nineteenth century. (I fear I belong to the vast number of ignoramuses with regard to this work.) Wills sets out to rectify that nescience. Apparently, Adams even had a very different slant on the Jeffersonians, arguing that thei...
Perhaps I should put this in a trilogy including Explaining America and Inventing America. Here, Wills shows how Lincoln's Gettysburg Address foreshadowed our conception of the United States today (just a minor semantic example: prior to 1865, I would have written "these United States," as if I were...
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