Garry Wills

Garry Wills (Chesterton, Papal sin, Saint Augustine)

Garry Wills is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. Wills received a Ph.D. in classics from Yale and has had a distinguished career as an author, with books such as Lincoln at Gettysburg, John Wayne's America, a biography of St. Augustine, and A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. He has received numerous accolades, including the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for Lincoln at Gettysburg) and the NEH Presidential Medal. Wills is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his articles appear frequently in The New York Review of Books. (added from Random House)… (more)

Garry Wills (Chesterton, Papal sin, Saint Augustine)

Garry Wills is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. Wills received a Ph.D. in classics from Yale and has had a distinguished career as an author, with books such as Lincoln at Gettysburg, John Wayne's America, a biography of St. Augustine, and A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. He has received numerous accolades, including the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for Lincoln at Gettysburg) and the NEH Presidential Medal. Wills is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his articles appear frequently in The New York Review of Books. (added from Random House)… (more)

Garry Wills (Chesterton, Papal sin, Saint Augustine)

Garry Wills is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. Wills received a Ph.D. in classics from Yale and has had a distinguished career as an author, with books such as Lincoln at Gettysburg, John Wayne's America, a biography of St. Augustine, and A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. He has received numerous accolades, including the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for Lincoln at Gettysburg) and the NEH Presidential Medal. Wills is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his articles appear frequently in The New York Review of Books. (added from Random House)… (more)

Historian, Pulitzer Prize winner, and one-time seminarian, Wills follows Why priests? with this look at the Catholic Church. Presenting seven case studies of doctrinal shifts in the last century, Wills notes that none were brought about by the Pope single-handedly, and he outlines what may be within the scope of Francis, the first Jesuit and the first South American to become Pontiff, to achieve. (Viking)

Street: 5015 Connecticut Ave NW City: Washington, Province: District Of Columbia Postal Code: 20008 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Garry Wills (Chesterton, Papal sin, Saint Augustine)

Garry Wills is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. Wills received a Ph.D. in classics from Yale and has had a distinguished career as an author, with books such as Lincoln at Gettysburg, John Wayne's America, a biography of St. Augustine, and A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. He has received numerous accolades, including the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for Lincoln at Gettysburg) and the NEH Presidential Medal. Wills is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his articles appear frequently in The New York Review of Books. (added from Random House)… (more)

Wednesday, August 13, 6 PM Harold Washington Library Center 400 S. State St. Chicago, IL 60605 312.747.4300

From the bestselling author of "Nixonland" a dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s.

In January of 1973 Richard Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War and prepared for a triumphant second term--until televised Watergate hearings revealed his White House as little better than a mafia den. The next president declared upon Nixon's resignation "our long national nightmare is over"--but then congressional investigators exposed the CIA for assassinating foreign leaders. The collapse of the South Vietnamese government rendered moot the sacrifice of some 58,000 American lives. The economy was in tatters. And as Americans began thinking about their nation in a new way--as one more nation among nations, no more providential than any other--the pundits declared that from now on successful politicians would be the ones who honored this chastened new national mood.

Ronald Reagan never got the message. Which was why, when he announced his intention to challenge President Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, those same pundits dismissed him--until, amazingly, it started to look like he just might "win." He was inventing the new conservative political culture we know now, in which a vision of patriotism rooted in a sense of American limits was derailed in America's Bicentennial year by the rise of the smiling politician from Hollywood. Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of America's greatest city, "The invisible bridge "asks the question: what does it mean to" "believe in America? To wave a flag--or to reject the glibness of the flag wavers?

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications; Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history and appeared on the best books of the year lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. His essays and book reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among others. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. He lives in Chicago.

Garry Wills, Emeritus Professor of History at Northwestern University, is an author, journalist, and historian. Among his nearly forty books are the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, and Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. He lives in Chicago, IL.

Location: Street: Harold Washington Library Center Additional: 400 S. State St. City: Chicago, Province: Illinois Postal Code: 60605 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

In the first of a series of conversations between Rick Perlstein and notable guests, Rick will discuss with Garry Wills a theme that ties Wills' diverse projects together: a distrust and contempt for concentrated power.

Location: Street: Seminary Co-op Bookstore Additional: 5751 S. Woodlawn Avenue City: Chicago, Province: Illinois Postal Code: 60637-1507 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Please join us as Garry Wills discusses his latest book, Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism.

About Font of Life:

No two men were more influential in the early Church than Ambrose, the powerful Bishop of Milan, and Augustine, the philosopher from provincial Africa who would write The Confessions and The City of God. Different in background, they were also extraordinarily different in personality. In Font of Life, Garry Wills explores the remarkable moment when their lives intersected at one of the most important, yet rarely visited, sites in the Christian world.

Location: Street: 57th Street Books Additional: 1301 E. 57th Street City: Chicago, Province: Illinois Postal Code: 60637 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Garry Wills

Distinguished scholar Garry Wills ("Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer"), Professor of History Emeritus, Northwestern University, presents "Shakespeare & Verdi: Men of the Theater," the third lecture in a series called "Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar." This program is a collaboration with The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College and part of the series. The exhibition "The Changing Face of William Shakespeare" will be open at 5:30 p.m. especially for program attendees. Tickets are $10-15. (palimpsestuous)… (more)