OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Engagements With History Punctuate a Lifetime in Books
By Dwight Garner, New York Times,  November 2, 2010

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Adventures of an Observer
By Garry Wills
195 pages. Viking. $25.95.

“Square,” “colorless,” “stodgy,” “unthreatening.” Those are some of the adjectives that the prolific journalist and historian Garry Wills uses to describe himself in “Outside Looking In,” his pointillistic new memoir.

Author photo right by Joe Schuyler

Off the page, all those things may (or may not) be true. On it, as countless politicians and writers have learned, having Mr. Wills sternly contemplate your work can be like having the Red Baron on your tail. “Unthreatening” is hardly the word. Writing in The New York Review of Books and other journals, he’s sent entire squadrons of shoddy works and ideas down in flames.

Mr. Wills has written some 40 books of his own, from pinwheeling political analysis (“Nixon Agonistes,” published in 1970) to sober inquiry about celebrity (“John Wayne’s America,” published in 1997) to meditations on oratory and language. In 1993 he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.”

Now 76, Mr. Wills is also among America’s leading Roman Catholic intellectuals; in recent years faith has become his abiding preoccupation. In the last decade alone he’s written nearly a dozen books about religion, including “Saint Augustine’s Sin” (2003) and “What the Gospels Meant” (2008), in addition to many on other subjects.
Full story at NYT.