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Summary: Made me want to learn more.
Review: Never before have I read a history book that was so riveting. I read it and then read it again.
The other reviews give great details into why this book was so good so I will only add this: This is a book that rekindled a desire in me to read more and to learn more.
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Summary: Lincoln's Audacious Challenge To Legalistic Thinking
Review: "All men are created equal." Instead of the Constitution, Lincoln found his inspiration from the Declaration of Independence. He spoke of the United States as a nation - with a moral commonality - and not simply as a confederation of states governed by laws that don't "specifically" prohibit slavery. Garry Wills, an enthusiastic fan, explores how Lincoln turned America's vision of itself from "what we are" to "what our forefathers wanted us to be." Some passages of interest to look for: • Social context. Lincoln expressed agnosticism regarding black intellectual capacity. What's important is that this was considered a "liberal" position. • The Charleston Speech, its humor and lampooning of Douglas, and its political success. • Lincoln's reticence to escalate war rhetoric and demonize the South. These are by no means the most important aspects of this fantastic treatise, but they are a few of the interesting colors in the fabric of the time and place that made Lincoln's brief remarks at Gettysburg resonate in our national consciousness. Lincoln illuminates the difference between following a legalistic path, and pursuing what is morally right. Wills hits this point dead on. This is a brilliant book.
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Summary: Eternally Abe
Review: "Four score and seven years ago," some history teacher made you memorize and recite some boring speech by this bearded dude. I think he was, like, kind of important. Historian Wills painstakingly evokes the political, social, and literary climate of 1863, focusing ultimately on the 272 word address that transformed the Civil War and our country along with it. You may have known that bloated bodies still lined the battlefield when Lincoln stood to say his peace more than four months later; or that principal speaker Edward Everett's two hour speech was modeled on the classical oratory of antiquity. What you won't appreciate until you read Lincoln at Gettysburg is how Honest Abe's brief remarks stand as a living testament to the power of the spoken word. With the presidency up for grabs this year, it's exciting to read about a president who wrote his own speeches and then had the strength of conviction to back them up.
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Summary: Not a history but a critique of Lincoln's Address
Review: "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States."
Although I give Wills' book only three stars, my review will not be as harsh as the above quote which the Chicago Tribune published soon after Lincoln's address in 1863.
Wills writes a invaluable piece of literature about the Gettysburg Address and very much deserved the Pulitzer Award; however, I forewarn prospective readers on the book that this is less history and more a critique on the Address itself.
Wills painstakingly dissects Lincoln's speech line by line and even word by word. He examines the influence of the Greek Revival in the speech and compares sections of it to classic Greek writings. Wills also discusses the importance of God and death being referred to in the Address and also covers transcendentalism.
"Lincoln at Gettysburg" is a genuine appreciation of Lincoln's "few appropriate remarks," but the history element, which I was seeking, wasn't all there. But I don't believe Wills ever intended this to be a historical review so before buying the book, know what you are looking for. If you want a history of the speech, what events led up to the Address and the reaction of the American people to it, I'd look elsewhere. However, anyone interested in speech classes, oratory skills or a literary examination of the Gettysburg Address and its influences, Wills' book will be the most complete and concise work on the subject and is the answer you have been looking for. - A thumbs up to Wills for including Edward Everett's two-hour speech in the back of his book. While most of us have heard that Lincoln was not the featured speaker and spoke for only two minutes after Everett's saga on Nov. 19, it is not widely known what was said prior to Lincoln's closing. Wills includes in the Appendix Everett's entire speech and gives us little doubt why Everett wrote to Lincoln the next day, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."
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Summary: the truth
Review: "The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves." -- H.L. Mencken
Rating: 
Summary: Lincoln at Gettysburg
Review: As the title suggests, Wills really does portray how Lincoln's Gettysburg Address remade America. Throughout the book Wills does a great job of explaining how Lincoln was influenced by the early Greeks, 19th century transcendentalists, and Romanticism. Instead of criticizing Lincoln like most authors try to do, Wills tried to explain how Lincoln's vision was based on Liberty and Equality. Overall, explaining that the majority of the Gettysburg Address was based on the Declaration of Independence. Wills stresses the fact that our society is partly based on the Gettysburg Address, and sometimes stressing it too much. This is the only flaw I've found in the book. After reading this book my view on Lincoln's 250 or so word essay and greatly changed in a good light. I highly reccomend this book.
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Summary: A new perspective on American history
Review: At only 272 words Lincoln's Gettysburg address is remarkably short for a speech that has had so much impact. If Garry Wills' thesis in Lincoln at Gettysburg is correct it has had even more impact then I had ever imaged. Wills' thesis is that the address was "the words that remade America". This is a surprising claim given the brevity of the speech. To justify this claim Wills' spends a large portion of the book explaining America of the time of the Gettysburg address. In fact this is over done in my opinion. It becomes tedious at times. The author also provides a lot of information about what Lincoln was thinking at the time, based on his contemporaneous writings as well as those of his aids. I am not convinced even after reading the text and copious appendixes, which take up a large portion of the book. It seems to me that the subtitle was overreaching. Never the less the book was fascinating and showed me a picture of America that I was not familiar with. It gave me a perspective I would never have had otherwise.
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Summary: How Lincoln made the Declaration of Independence Matter
Review: Each Fourth of July somewhere in this country, people try to get signatures on a petition that lists grievances against the government. Most people refuse to sign but there are those who recognize the words of the Declaration of Independence and gladly sign their names. Of course, once you get through the famous opening declaration, most Americans would not know the specific charges leveled by Jefferson and the Continental Congress against King George III. But Garry Willis' study of "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America" examines the 272 word speech that made the opening words of the Declaration part of the American consciousness. Prior to November of 1863 most Americans did not accept the principle that "all men are created equal." After Lincoln finished his speech at Gettysburg, the nation's commitment to that ideal was signed in the blood of the Civil War dead. At 266 pages (plus notes and index) Willis' book is as concise as Lincoln's speech. Most of the analysis deals with the origins of the speech, looking at both its classical antecedents and the specific rhetorical situation of the dedication ceremony for the cemetery on the field at Gettysburg. But Willis also deals with how Lincoln's words have resonated from that time forward. The greatest speech in American history remains Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream," but without the Gettysburg Address the time of the Civil Rights movement and the place of the Lincoln Memorial, wherein Lincoln's speech is carved, would never have come about. For teachers of either American history or rhetoric, this book contains much more than you would ever need to know and much more than you could ever impart to your students. But the importance of this speech is made crystal clear and that is what our students need to know, to understand, and to remember.
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Summary: Lincoln's words in the hands of a classical scholar
Review: Ever since I heard Gore Vidal praise Lincoln's abilities as a writer, I wanted to read more of what that master politician had written. The perfect opportunity came along with this book, which is a rhetorical analysis of the Gettysburg address set in historical context. Wills offers not only Lincoln through his own words, but a vivid window into a past era. From it, Lincoln emerges as a political genius, who invented an entirely new kind of public discourse with the G address. Instead of following the current fashion of long addresses, which to his credit Wills does not ridicule, Lincoln write a short piece that would be picked up and repeated verbatim and in the process initiate the healing of the nation. As part of the context, Wills explains the meaning and history of cemetaries, which is far more interesting than I imagined possible. But that is part of Wills' remarkable art: he unearths these things and shows us how they fit together. And hs writing style: sheer beauty and clarity.
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Summary: Places The Speech Back On The Pedestal
Review: For longer than a century, the three minute speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln has stood as a model of the new oratory style; it has a precise construction; and it crystalizes the thinking, "that all men are created equal." Wills, after compiling a monumental amount of research and after sifting through enormous amounts of background materials, writes nothing short of a full exegesis of the speech, analyzing it against the culture in which it was created--the Greek revival oratory movement--and, of course, against the backdrop of the battlefield. This exploration of the speech restores the conceptual glory to the speech as it should be. For too long, too many students of History and Forensics have glossed over the Address. Wills' book should restore it to the pedestal where it belongs.
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