Inventing Jefferson

Garry Wills, like his old hero Chesterton, is a genius of summary. Several of his books—Chesterton: Man and Mask, Nixon Agonistes, Bare Ruined Choirs—are, for all their faults, marvels of compressed abundance, with remarkably little overlap among them. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is his best yet: it has its subject’s passion for accuracy, and lifts scholarship to creation.

Wills once told an interviewer that he saw himself as a “courier among disciplines,” a vivid though too modest description of his special talent. Sometimes his eagerness to summarize becomes a rush to judgment: he covets the sovereignty of the last word. And this fault is unfortunately compounded by the temper of a scorpion. Is there another journalist who would avenge himself by devoting two columns to a cop who had given him a ticket? He has also a puritan’s way of taking everyone else’s sins as personal affronts to himself. He knows how hard it is for lesser men to make a fool of him, without realizing how easily he does it unassisted, largely because he still strains, at age 44, to show he’s the smartest kid in the class.

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Joseph Sobran

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Thomas Jefferson

Declaration of Independence

Garry Wills, like his old hero Chesterton, is a genius of summary. Several of his books—Chesterton: Man and Mask, Nixon Agonistes, Bare Ruined Choirs—are, for all their faults, marvels of compressed abundance, with remarkably little overlap among them. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is his best yet: it has its subject’s passion for accuracy, and lifts scholarship to creation.

Wills once told an interviewer that he saw himself as a “courier among disciplines,” a vivid though too modest description of his special talent. Sometimes his eagerness to summarize becomes a rush to judgment: he covets the sovereignty of the last word. And this fault is unfortunately compounded by the temper of a scorpion. Is there another journalist who would avenge himself by devoting two columns to a cop who had given him a ticket? He has also a puritan’s way of taking everyone else’s sins as personal affronts to himself. He knows how hard it is for lesser men to make a fool of him, without realizing how easily he does it unassisted, largely because he still strains, at age 44, to show he’s the smartest kid in the class.