Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders, by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, 323 pp., $23)
IN THE introduction to this odd volume, Garry Wills asks if successful leaders are superior beings who impose themselves on men and events, and answers, sensibly, that things are more complicated than that: “Most literature on leadership is Unitarian. But life is trinitarian. One-legged and two-legged chairs do not, of themselves, stand. A third leg is needed. Leaders, followers, and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.” This promising beginning is followed by 16 essays on disparate figures—Socrates to Cesare Borgia—who are supposed to represent different types of leaders. The quality of the essays is as various as their subjects; the chapter on Dorothy Day, the Catholic radical, is the best. The book is equal parts scholasticism, journalism, and self-help—as if Thomas Aquinas had been asked to rewrite The Management Secrets of Attila the Hun for The Atlantic Monthly.
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