Customer Reviews

Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This isn't quite what I expected, but it's a good read. This book details a series of recollections of his most valued experiences. He talks of meeting his wife, his complex relationship with Bill Buckley and other National Review colleagues, investigating Nixon, bonding with Hillary Clinton, Studs Terkel, and Thomas D'Allesandro (Nancy Pelosi's brother for those who haven't heard of him, and many other fascinating individuals.It wasn't really long and I'm not sure I would buy it at the hardcover price, but if you have followed Garry Wills' career you'll want to read Outside Looking In.

Normally, nonfiction will not keep you at the edge of your seat. However, this book grabbed on to me, and did not let go. I could not wait to read more about his escapades or the people he writes about. He communicates his life without hubris, yet, he has lived a marvelous, unassuming and well-intended life. And many of his friends are people I would love to have met once. And more importantly, his stories will make you smile.

Thank you to Gary Wills for writing this. By the way, you don't have to know anything about him or the people he writes about to enjoy the book. He is a brilliant writer who weaves entertaining stories to read.

Overall, this book is well written, easy to read, and flows.

This book is not really a memoir. It's more a series of vignettes containing Wills's recollections of various times and people who have been important in his life. He's unsparing in his portrait of his father, without being unkind, and his admiration for Studs Terkel oozes off the page. I found it curious that he describes himself as a conservative in these pages; I suppose that's an indication of how far into yahoo-land the people who describe themselves a conservatives today have gone.

The book is full of Wills's clean, erudite prose, and its 184 pages slipped by all too quickly. The book ends with a valentine to his wife, Natalie. It's beautifully written. I hope that when I've been married to my wife for fifty years, I can muster something that comes close to what Wills has written here.

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: ADVERTURES OF A JOURNALIST is a well-written book. For this reason, I give it five stars. It consists of a series of Garry Wills' memories about his life. These are mostly an old man's fond memories. Fortunately, he does not seem to be settling scores. But the chapters are not arranged in chronological order. Toward the end, he does have a chapter about his father and his early childhood, and the last chapter is about his private life (his wife and marriage). But most of the other chapters are about his public life as a journalist and the people he met in connection with his journalistic writing.

Prospective readers of this book might reasonably wonder where Wills is coming from, as they say. Catholic sociologists of religion have referred to Catholics in the United States as forming and belonging to a Catholic ghetto. Protestant anti-Catholic bias contributed decisively to the formation and perpetuation of this so-called Catholic ghetto. However, in response to strong external conditions that contributed to making and perpetuating this so-called Catholic ghetto, Catholic themselves undertook the formation of a parallel culture of their own, most obviously through the development of Catholic formal education. Wills is the product of the ghetto Catholic culture of Catholic formal education.

In this new book Garry Wills does not give us exact dates for various events in the course of his life. But he was born in 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia. He grew up in Michigan and Wisconsin. His parents were high school graduates. He tells us that at an early age he had become a bookworm. But he does not reflect on what had prompted him to become a bookworm. His parents weren't bookworms. He went to Catholic schools taught by nuns. In elementary school in Adrian, Michigan, he learned how to diagram sentences in English. In the Jesuit boarding school in Wisconsin that he subsequently attended, he learned Latin and Greek and how to diagram sentences in Latin and Greek (pages 4-5).

At some juncture in his life, he entered the Jesuit order, which has a two-year novitiate. As part of his Jesuit training, he did his undergraduate studies at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri. During his graduate studies at Xavier University in Cincinnati, he decided to leave the Jesuit order.

Because of his interest in ancient Greek drama, he was able somehow to land a job as theater reviewer at William F. Buckley's magazine NATIONAL REVIEW. This job brought him under Buckley's influence. Both Buckley and Wills were Catholics. Like most other American Catholics at the time, both men were anti-communists. Wills claims that he told Buckley that he (Wills) was a distributivist. Distributivism was advanced by the English Catholic convert G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936). In due time Wills' first book would be about Chesterton. But as everybody familiar with Buckley knows, he favored free-market capitalism, not Chesterton's proposed distributivism. According to Wills, Buckley told him that he (Buckley) did not consider him to be a conservative. Nevertheless, Buckley and Wills hit it off and became friends. Wills even undertook to research an authorized biography of Buckley. However, Buckley became a strong supporter of the Vietnam war, which Wills opposed. This strong difference of opinion led Buckley to break off their relationship. Wills never completed the biography of Buckley that he had started to research. If you ask me, this break with Buckley probably worked out for the better for Wills because it took him away from Buckley's influence.

Before the break with Buckley, Will had met the young woman who would eventually become his wife of fifty years. After they were married, his new wife accompanied him on his trip to England to research his book about Chesterton, which was published in 1961 by Sheed & Ward. The literary critic Hugh Kenner's first book had also been about Chesterton, PARADOX IN CHESTERTON (Sheed & Ward, 1947). As wills explains (pages 177-78), Massie Ward (the Ward in the name of the publishing house Sheed & Ward) was Chesterton's first biographer.

In the meantime, Wills managed to be accepted into the Ph.D. program in classics at Yale University. According to published sources, Wills' 1961 doctoral dissertation was titled THE ARCHITECTONICS OF STRIFE: A STUDY IN THE DYNAMICS OF AESCHYLUS' "ORESTEIA." With his Yale Ph.D. in classics, Wills was able to secure a teaching position at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he taught Greek for about eighteen years. Subsequently, he taught at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the Chicago area, for twenty-five years. At times, he taught only part-time at each university, which enabled him to pursue his research and writing as a journalist.

As a journalist, Wills came in contact with people of different political persuasions, as the chapters of his new book show.

The last chapter is about how he happened to meet his wife of fifty years. He clearly considers her to have been one of the great blessings in his life. After recounting how he met her and how she has been such a great blessing in his life, he pauses and observes all the different small happenstances that could have turned out differently in how he had happened to have met her and pursued her. For understandable reasons, he marvels at how easily the course of his fifty years of married life with her could have been thrown off course, had certain events not occurred as they actually did occur.

Even though I am about ten years younger than Garry Wills, I have also had occasion to reflect on an analogous kind of fortuitous juncture of my life with the life of a former teacher of mine at Saint Louis University, Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003). (As noted above, Wills also went to Saint Louis University, but at an earlier time.) I've studied Ong's work since the fall of 1964, and I have written about his thought extensively over the rest of my life. Granted, my experience is only analogous to Wills' experience. But the common element in our admittedly different experiences is that each of us has recognized later in life how fortuitous a significant event turned out to be in our lives.

The NYTimes review of Wills's latest book seemed to give it short shift in its relative brevity and lack of critique, almost as if Wills was to be revered and feared. Then again, that may be the case as his interview with Deborah Solomon suggests that he does not suffer fools gladly. To call the review pusillanimous may be a little strong but I'd certainly expected more critical engagement from a NYTimes reviewer. I must say Wills's pseudo memoir comprising set pieces of his journalistic experiences is highly readable and presented in an interesting form i.e. selective short essays and vignettes highlighting episodes of his personal and professional encounters with prominent public figures that collectively frame and present an aspect of his own public persona, such as it is. At times, the volume felt like an exercise in voracious name-dropping, with cameo appearances by then-well-known characters as they drifted in and out of orbit in his professional and social milieus, some of whose names may fail to register with a younger generation e.g. Lillian Hellman, Whittaker Chambers et al. In these sections, Wills sounded as if he was writing for a coterie who were all in it together and who would catch his inside jokes and allusions.

An odd note emerged as I finished, in terms of his almost strenuous demurrals about being a boring, stodgy and (perhaps by implication) modest person. It made me wonder to what end he'd intended this volume if not to also indulge in a certain peevish pride in his experiences and oft-touted status as an outsider, thereby revealing a false modesty that directly contradicted his initial demurrals. That in no way detracts from his writing and I remain a great fan of his work, although I wish I've not been privy to such suggested (suggestive?) revelations of character. That said, Wills clearly bears affection for his subjects (with a particular soft spot for the females) even though a critical note never seemed far from the surface. It is only in his loving and unreserved tribute to his wife in the final chapter that he evinced a certain redeeming and appealing vulnerability.

Do not consider this a memoir. There is only a little introspection throughout (until the end), and not much to teach us about what made Garry Wills the great writer and observer he is. Actually, his "Why I am a Catholic" is more autobiographical, and careful readers of his other books can discern a lot about the man through his writing. Every book he has written, historical or religious, reveals him personally. That's the way it should be with good writers. I have read at least 12 of his books, and I feel I already know the man. "Outside Looking In" gives us a bit more, though, especially on his two most important relationships (William F. Buckley and his wife, Natalie), but the presentation is scattered and lacks the nuance and consideration of the rest of his writings. The chapters here do read like a collection of his greatest hits with no cohesion, and no emotional undertow to pull us in. We, too, are left outside looking in, as dispassionate as Wills himself would like us to believe he is. No, the book is not boring if you are already a Wills fan, but only gives us a little more than we already know. So if you're thinking this book will be a "What Garry Wills Meant" book, you will be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you want some interesting anecdotes from an interesting man, than buy the book.

Garry Wills has had a long and interesting career. He was born in 1934 and hence lived through some of America's (and the world's) most dynamic times. He is an intelligent and gifted writer, holding a PhD in Classics from Yale, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Medal for the Humanities, and the title of emeritus at Northwestern University. As a journalist he has covered the civil rights movement, presidential campaigns, and the Kennedy assassination. Wills has written countless books (almost one book per year) whose topics range from Catholicism and Christianity to Macbeth and James Madison. I hope this latest installment to Wills' oeuvre is not the last (it is unlikely to be) for two reasons: one, Wills is one of the nation's most respected authors, and two, this disappointing book does not fit as a keystone to Wills' great and massive body of work.

This 184-page book, advertised as a memoir, is actually a series of short vignettes on topics ranging from Nixon to Natalie (his beloved wife). As such there is little connection between the chapters, and the theme of Wills as an "outsider" is not as pervasive as Wills thinks it seems. True, Wills' narratives do portray him as a modest and shy Midwesterner who (thankfully, or else there would not have been much color in Wills' life) stereotypically can't turn down an interlocutor (this Midwestern characteristic lands Wills in a host of interesting circumstances), but it felt like the book lacked the overarching "adventures" that its subtitle promised. That is to say that I wished this book would have been more like an autobiography-cum-history rather than a series of mostly unrelated topics. Wills has lived through interesting times---he should have written an interesting book.

For one who has read most of his works, this is a bit of a letdown. The great Wills, the Wills of the Nixon, Washington, Reagan and Wayne bios; the Wills of the papacy and Catholicism and the New Testament and St Augustine; the Wills of "Inventing America " and "Lincoln `s Gettysburg" remains at the top of the heap. This book, however, is a slight one; a series of essays that seems more suited to the pages of a magazine. His last book, "Bomb Power" was also a short Wills, but the focus on the central theme gave it the gravitas one expects from a Wills book. I bought this new. shouldv'e waited for the dollar version.

. . . "Let me tell you, son, of the famous people I have known."
Mildly interesting in parts. Pretty tedious in most. Like the famous
opera singer who does "one last tour" too many.

Makes me wonder how he ever achieved his earlier writing status...particularly his book on Augustine.

Much of his life seems by accident, just like mine, I guess. I'd expect more from such a bright light.

I know he has a first rate mind, but it surely doesn't show through in this book. What I took from it is that no matter how far I fall from my faith, never give up on the Rosary. Or, I'd add for my own survival kit, the sacraments and the Mass.

Others may revel in Wills' intense self-examination of Liberal conscience.That said, there's no accounting for taste.