Books, Arts & Manners: Wills to Power

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, 315 pp., $23)

GARRY WILLS is an intelligent man, a serious scholar, and the author of some 16 books, including the present one, perhaps his masterpiece. His books vary widely in quality, but even when they are sloppily constructed, as is Under God, or wrong-headed, as is Inventing America, they nevertheless are serious, original, and with much else to recommend them. Lincoln at Gettysburg is perhaps Pulitzer Prize stuff; and I would place just behind it his Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, which had to do with the representation of George Washington in art and, despite some iconographic lapses, was superb.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, 315 pp., $23)

GARRY WILLS is an intelligent man, a serious scholar, and the author of some 16 books, including the present one, perhaps his masterpiece. His books vary widely in quality, but even when they are sloppily constructed, as is Under God, or wrong-headed, as is Inventing America, they nevertheless are serious, original, and with much else to recommend them. Lincoln at Gettysburg is perhaps Pulitzer Prize stuff; and I would place just behind it his Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, which had to do with the representation of George Washington in art and, despite some iconographic lapses, was superb.