Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America [L0094]

1992 - HCDJ Excellent condition. Throughout this Pulitzer Prize winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America Garry, Wills performs a literary dissection of sorts of a prominent American document, examining both its structure & function in an exceedingly formal and intricate manner. The author looks at Abraham Lincoln's very brief three minute statement at Gettysburg in terms of the classic rhetorical formats of Greek & Rome. Wills details in this masterly work how Lincoln reached back to the Declaration of Independence to write the greatest speech in the nation's history. The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece. By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "What I most enjoyed about this book is that it gave a generally interdisciplinary discussion of this great funeral oration by touching on the influences of the 19th century rural cemetery movement, the Transcendentalist movement, the Greek Revival movement, as well as the influences of the 19th century American abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. In explaining how the Gettysburg Address was written in just a few words, the author made it easy to understand by literally tearing the document apart and discussing why Lincoln wrote it in the style we are familiar with."; "Wills takes a very academic and historic look at Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. He goes deep into Greek and Roman oratory, and Lincoln's contemporary use of their themes and style and how it spoke to people of that time and place. Most importantly, he describes how in such a short, at the time rather overlooked speech, Lincoln not only gave new meaning to the Civil War, but America itself. Brilliant and multi-faceted."; "Just a beautiful piece of work that is also possibly the best book I've read on Abraham Lincoln. Wills does a wonderful job of analyzing Lincoln's influences, from the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Theodore Parker to the oratory of the Greek revival movement to Romanticism, and all of it is so lucidly described and densely packed together that I often had to put the book down to absorb it all or think on it for a moment. Lincoln, Wills asserts, helped craft America as an international and on-going project for human betterment, rather than a local and limited one, and in so far as this speech reshaped generations of Americans' views of their country and its founding, Lincoln truly succeeded in ensuring a "new birth of freedom" for the nation. Overall it's a well-wrought description of the political and intellectual life of mid-nineteenth century America, one which also shows how a single genius managed to reshape that life going forward."