Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence by Garry Wills  (8)  $10.20

Lincoln's Greatest Speech : The Second Inaugural by Ronald C. White Jr.  (26)

What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills  (63)  $10.40

Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (Vintage) by Douglas L. Wilson  (8)  $10.17

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A former professor of Greek at Yale University, Wills painstakingly deconstructs Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and discovers heavy influence from the early Greeks (Pericles) and the 19th century Transcendentalists (Edward Everett). The author also probes Lincoln's decision to rely more on the Declaration of Independence than the U.S. Constitution, a decision Wills says represented a "revolution in thought." He speaks effusively of the 272-word address: "All modern political prose descends from [it]. The Address does what all great art accomplishes. [I]t tease[s] us out of thought." Wills' book won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

From Publishers Weekly
Wills ( Inventing America ) combines semantics and political analysis in this account of the most famous speech in U.S. history. He puts Lincoln's words in their cultural and intellectual contexts, establishing the contributions of New England Transcendentalism and the Greek Revival to the structure and the substance of the address. He also interprets the speech as revolutionary, since it's a speech, too for in it Lincoln bypassed as is, seems that Wills, not Lincoln, is bypassing the Constitution to justify civic equality and national union on the basis of the Declaration of Independence. Wills's analysis of the matrix of Lincoln's text is more convincing than his present-minded critique of "original intent." Nevertheless, he makes a strong case for his argument that the concept of "a single people dedicated to a proposition" has been overwhelmingly accepted by successive generations of Americans. BOMC, History Book Club and QPB alternates; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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First Sentence:
James Hurt says that Lincoln used "the ordinary coin of funeral oratory" at Gettysburg. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
lives that that nation, testing whether that nation, delivery text, composition draft, proposition that all men, rural cemetery, last full measure, perish from the earth, slave power, increased devotion Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg Address, Mount Auburn, Judge Douglas, Theodore Parker, Justice Story, Mark Twain, Supreme Court, Dred Scott, Edward Everett, Greek Revival, New England, Daniel Webster, George Bancroft, Stephen Douglas, Emancipation Proclamation, George Washington, Oak Ridge, Sleepy Hollow, South Carolina, Edmund Wilson, First Inaugural, Fugitive Slave Act, Justice Taney, Kansas-Nebraska Act New!
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