Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer

by Garry Wills

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, stories of the fascinating people he has closely observed during more than fifty years of reporting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143119890
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/27/2011
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Garry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, Why I Am a Catholic, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Date of Birth:

May 22, 1934

Place of Birth:

Atlanta, GA

Education:

St. Louis University, B.A., 1957; Xavier University, M.A., 1958; Yale University, Ph.D., 1961

Editorial Reviews

… Outside Looking In functions like an erudite jukebox, summoning amusing, tragic and telling anecdotes at a rapid clip, each well told, all enriching our understanding of postwar America's politics, passions and pieties. … [It] is essential for readers interested in this prolific and immensely gifted writer - notwithstanding his protestations that they should not be.
—The Washington Post

James Rosen

…the most limber and humane book Mr. Wills has written in years…Outside Looking In is, most fundamentally, a series of pointed scenes from a busy life. Its vaguely oxymoronic subtitle ("Adventures of an Observer") seems misleading. No one who counted William F. Buckley, John Waters, Studs Terkel, Beverly Sills and Murray Kempton among his many friends, and who had close-up views of many of the last century's signal events, can qualify as a true outsider.
—The New York Times

Dwight Garner