Stephen's got historian/journalist/intellectual/professional thinkerGarry Wills, author of lots including the new memoir Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer. Here's Publisher's Weekly (Amazon, B&N):
This is an episodic but completely captivating collection by the prolific journalist, historian, political columnist, and practicing Catholic Wills (Lincoln at Gettysburg). Now 76, he writes an intensely opinionated re-evaluation of leaders he has encountered (surprisingly favorable for some, such as Nixon, whom he called "an intellectually serious and prepared candidate"), autobiographical reminiscences, and insightful, mostly admiring essays on important people in his life, including Studs Terkel (shrewd about politicians, generous to his friends); Beverly Sills and her popular mother, known as Mama Sills; his father (fearless, resilient, fun); and his loving tribute to his wife of 50 years. As for William Buckley, Wills began writing for his conservative National Review in 1957, but his 1960s support of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War produced a rupture. He describes how, with Buckley's sister Priscilla as intermediary, Wills and Buckley touchingly resumed their friendship before the latter's death in 2008. The book does not recycle old articles. although it includes outtakes, unprintable at the time, such as material about Nixon's marital troubles, omitted from an Esquire article during the 1968 presidential campaign
Kirkus has this:
Pulitzer Prize winner Wills (Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, 2010, etc.) offers up a pleasantly revealing grab bag of memories.
These rocking-chair ruminations are relaxed, intimate and impressionistic. Though he writes that he "was determined to be an outsider looking in, not a participant," he thoroughly engages with his subjects here, a number of whom were friends. These vest-pocket profiles are a genuine mix, from William F. Buckley, who emerges not as the bombastic right-winger he projected in his public life, but as a generous, risk-taking soul, a man whose "gifts were facility, flash, and charm, not depth of prolonged wrestling with a problem," to Wills’s wife, who receives as endearing a love letter as the retiring Wills will likely ever openly tender. The author has canny things to say about public figures, including Richard Nixon ("an emotionally wounded man who rises to power without ever becoming a full human being"); Thomas D’Alesandro III, the hard-boiled mayor of Baltimore who cut the entitled legs out from under presidential aspirant Jerry Brown; and fellow Chicagoan Studs Terkel. But much of the best stuff concerns people at the edge of the limelight, such as organizer Septima Clark, who let Andrew Young know that arriving at a voter-registration drive in a chartered plane was "no way to join dirt-poor people getting literacy qualifications in order to vote"; opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin ("listening to the man’s beautiful barking was like hearing a cave sing"); and James Bevel, the daring strategist for the SCLC who later joined Lyndon LaRouche’s party and later still was convicted of incest. Only rarely do his comments fail to have bite.
Ultimately, it is Wills himself who shines brightest from these pages—owlish, ethical, skeptical of power, deep of faith and achingly honest.
There's an assortment of reviews, interviews, etc. floating around (including the NPR interview with excerpt). This one entertained me:
Garry Wills, the Jesuit-educated writer and critic with a doctorate in Greek, says he’s an outsider. Such a claim has to be taken with a truckload of salt. If he’s an outsider, he’s there by choice....
...Fifty years ago, when William Buckley interviewed Wills for a job with the National Review. Buckley asked Wills, not surprisingly, if he was a conservative.
Wills said he was not, claiming instead to be a Distributist, one who held to the philosophy of the English Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton, who favored the "preservation of private property but for its wider distribution." Such a distinction may be too much for today’s emotion-laden politics.
Wills’ first essay, "A Bookworm’s Confession," tells a funny story about his father trying to wean him away from books while he was in grade school. The outcome is predictive of Wills’ modus operandi later in life. Wills writes, "He paid me money (I think five dollars) if I would go a whole week without reading anything. I took the offer, and used the money to buy a new book."
Interesting guy, and this could be a good interview.
|