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A captivating memoir from the incomparable Garry Wills, "one of the country's most distinguished intellectuals" (The New York Times Book Review)
Illuminating and provocative, Outside Looking In is a compelling chronicle of an original thinker at work in remarkable times. With his dazzling style and journalist's eye for detail, Garry Wills brings history to life. Whether writing about the civil rights movement, 1960s protests, or close-up studies of the people who have shaped our world, only he could bring together in one book Barry Goldwater, Daniel Berrigan, Beverly Sills, Richard Nixon, and John Waters. Wills shares, as only the best raconteurs can, stories of the fascinating people he has closely observed during more than fifty years of reporting.
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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.
Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine’s Childhood, Saint Augustine’s Memory, and Saint Augustine’s Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
After graduating from Xavier, Wills was hired to work as the drama critic for National Review magazine, where he became a close personal friend and protégé of founding editor William F. Buckley. But as the winds of change blew across the 1960s, Wills got caught up in the cross-currents. A staunch Catholic anti-Communist in his youth, he began to drift away from political conservatism, galvanized by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam debate. He parted ways with National Review and began writing for more liberal-leaning publications like Esquire and the New York Review of Books, a defection that left him slightly estranged from Buckley for many years. (They reconciled before Buckley's death in 2008.)
In 1961, while he was still in grad school, Wills's first book, Chesterton: Man and Mask was published. [It was revised and reissued in 2001 with a new author's introduction.] Since then, the prolific Wills has gone on to pen critically acclaimed nonfiction that roams across history, politics, and religion. He expanded one of his Esquire articles into Nixon Agonistes (1970), a probing profile John Leonard said "...reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus." (The book landed Wills on the famous Nixon's Enemies List.) He has also written penetrating studies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Wayne, and Saint Paul; he has won two National Book Critics Circle Awards; and his 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Something of a rara avis, Wills is a Catholic intellectual who has produced thoughtful, scholarly books on religion in America. His translations of St. Augustine have received glowing reviews, and he has acted both as an outspoken critic of the Church (Papal Sin) and as an ardent advocate for his own faith Why I Am a Catholic). Proof of his accessibility can be found in the fact that several of his religion books have become bestsellers.
BigAZcat
Posted November 16, 2010
Garry Wills, an excellent writer, interviewer, and story teller, provides a cerebral and interesting insight into the complex man that was William F. Buckley with whom he worked as a screen writer for years. And, similarly provides insight and surprises into the thoughts of great men he has interviewed including Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter.
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Overview
A captivating memoir from the incomparable Garry Wills, "one of the country's most distinguished intellectuals" (The New York Times Book Review)
Illuminating and provocative, Outside Looking In is a compelling chronicle of an original thinker at work in remarkable times. With his dazzling style and journalist's eye for detail, Garry Wills brings history to life. Whether writing about the civil rights movement, 1960s protests, or close-up studies of the people who have shaped our world, only he could bring together in one book Barry Goldwater, Daniel Berrigan, Beverly Sills, Richard Nixon, and John Waters. Wills shares, as only the best raconteurs can, ...