Customer Reviews

American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton (Library of America)

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About a third of these speeches were delivered in my lifetime and I am pretty aware of most of the speeches included that were delivered during 1963 and later. Yes, I was young, but I was paying attention. I grew up with the echoes of WWII and Korea in my ears and the threat of nuclear war a part of the fabric of my life. The political speeches do not constitute everything that went into the crazy and tumultuous years that made up the sixties and seventies, but they were a reflection and were themselves an important portion of those times and events. The names if JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, LBJ, Carter, and Reagan resonate well even today.

This volume begins with Lincoln's speech on Reconstruction, Sojourner Truth is here, as is Frederick Douglass. Chief Joseph's brief and poignant reply to General Howard is here as is Oliver Wendell Holmes' powerful address on Memorial Day. Grover Cleveland's address dedicating the Statue of Liberty, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "The Solitude of Self", Booker T. Washington's "Address to the Atlanta Exposition" are all included.

Teddy Roosevelt is well represented as are speeches by Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, Oppenheimer, and Betty Friedan.

Because the speeches are given in their complete form, it is a great treasury for the student of American history. Too often, a sentence or two is used to represent the whole of the speech and that seldom provides enough context of structure for the argument of the speech.

There are biographical notes on the speakers and notes on the text provided in the back of book along with and index.

Terrific work and something you should have (with its companion volume) on your bookshelf.

This, the second volume of the two, is a complement to the great speeches of America's influential leaders. While one might wonder how such great oratory came from a disgraced President, one must also wonder how this individual ranks among the great: Chief Joseph, Huey Long, Frederick Douglass and Oliver Wendell Holmes, both Clinton and Nixon delivered some memorable speeches. You need to pick up this selection and see for yourself!

The title of this book should be an alert as how one could class the oratory work of Abraham Lincoln with Bill Clinton is beyond what a reasonable mind could accept. It is like having Albert Einstein and then including Daffy Duck.
For that reason, I wonder of the agenda and the claim that the author knows more than anyone about these speeches and how he can pass over the oratory of the Comanche, Cheyenne and Kiowa at the Medicine Lodge treaty or for that matter neglect the moving speeches of General Patton only to include Betty Friedan who history has already passed over like most to the recent "great" speeches included here.
There is just too much a mix of extraordinary with the mundane which appears like a political spin to try and make people like Bill Clinton appear great by sticking him in with Lincoln. How one can compare the destruction of a people in the words of Chief Joseph to what some of these speeches entail is pure rhetoric.
One would do better to seek out the people who made the speeches in biographies and autobiographies than to invest in this rendered work, but if you enjoy rolling your eyes in how the compiler includes paid speech writers for leaders with people like Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Chief Joseph.....then you probably will enjoy this book.
1 star to alert readers to think before they buy.