Garry Wills

The Kennedy Imprisonment by Garry Wills

April 27, 2023 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

“Hampton, New Hampshire, February, 1980: This night seems made to vindicate Frank Capra’s version of democracy.” This is subtitled “A Meditation on Power” and was published in the early years of the Reagan years. One of the things I think about Garry Wills is how much he seems to believe in the idea of America, and how much he seems to disdain the elements of America that tarnish that idea. I don’t mean that he’s blind to problems of America or looking to deny or […]

Witches and Jesuits

Witches and Jesuits by Garry Wills

September 26, 2022 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Garry Wills has a Phd in Classics, but has mostly spent his public career writing about politics, religion, and history. He’s most famous probably for a fallout with the “intellectual Conservatism” movement in the early seventies when he wrote a polemic against Nixon. He also won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 1990s for a book about the Gettysburg Address. In this book, he begins his study of Macbeth by asking the question: why do so many performances of Macbeth fail? He doesn’t exactly ever […]

Lincoln at Gettysburg

Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills

January 31, 2022 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

I am kind of in a mode recently of reading a lot of history books, and one of the questions that arise, especially in reading American history, is how is the history being written impacted by who is writing it, the focus they’re taking, and the things they end up saying. That’s true about all histories, but US history presents some thorny questions that almost always need addressing, or else face the potential of basically saying nothing. The Civil War is at the heart of […]

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