Most Popular Books by Garry Wills

One of literature''s greatest satirists, Martial earned his livelihood by excoriating the follies and vices of Roman society and its emperors, and set a pattern that satirists have admired across the ages. For the first time, readers can enjoy an English translation of these rhymes that does not sacrifice the cleverly constructed effects of Martial''s short and shapely thrusts. Martial''s Epigrams "bespeaks a great scholar at play" (The New York Times Book Review), makes for addictive reading, and is a perfect, if naughty, gift. Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What the Qur''an Meant, coming fall 2017.

In the Catholic Church, with the election of a conservative pope, Benedict XVI, it has led to a doctrinal zealotry, the alienation of large numbers of American Catholics, and an increased intrusion of the Church into politics."

Shakespeare’s plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth. Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity’s rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth’s reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule.

“A remarkable achievement—a learned yet eminently readable and provocative exploration of the four small books that reveal most of what’s known about the life and death of Jesus.” (Los Angeles Times) Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What the Qur''an Meant, coming fall 2017. In his New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant and What Paul Meant, Garry Wills offers tour-de-force interpretations of Jesus and the Apostle Paul. Here Wills turns his remarkable gift for biblical analysis to the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Wills examines the goals, methods, and styles of the evangelists and how these shaped the gospels'' messages. Hailed as "one of the most intellectually interesting and doctrinally heterodox Christians writing today" (The New York Times Book Review), Wills guides readers through the maze of meanings within these foundational texts, revealing their essential Christian truths.

The pivotal volume of the Christian philosopher''s seminal work is translated and interpreted by Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills.

Wills''s "Saint Augustine," which has had 11 printings, was a "New York Times" Notable Book. Now comes his third volume of "Saint Augustine''s Confessions."

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine’s Confessions In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills''s biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions. Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine''s life, modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. "We have to read Augustine as we do Dante," Wills writes, "alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism." Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics. With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine''s spiritual classic.

Final volume in a series of translations of Augustine''s Confessiones. Discusses the structure of the work, the controversies surrounding who was responsible for Augustine''s conversion, and the questions Augustine raises about the nature of conversion itself.

"You all know me, I''m Jack Ruby." That''s what the killer shouted when police grabbed him a split second after he had pumped a bullet into the stomach of Lee Oswald. Who was Jack Ruby? Madman? Superpatriot? Conspirator? Two top writers achieve a gripping portrait of the complex and contradictory character of Jack Ruby - a man who grew up in an immigrant home with a drunken father and an insane mother, who climbed out of the ghetto to become the owner of a popular Dallas nightclub. The authors let his friends and employees describe the Jack Ruby they knew. He was a punch-happy scrapper who fought before he thought because "I might lose my nerve." Ruby could "cuss straight on like saying his prayers" but didn''t allow dirty talk in front of his lady strippers. He could fire an employee seventeen times and pay for her kid''s operation. A bachelor, he "respected" his fiancee of twelve years too much to marry her. He sought the company of cops, newsmen, anyone he thought important. Jack Ruby had many acquaintances but his only real friends were his dogs. Living in the fringe-society of hucksters and hustlers, Jack Ruby longed to be a big man in Dallas. Until the day he died he had a childlike awe of "class," respectability, and the law. Wills and Demaris get completely inside the mind of this complex man. They recreate the day Jack Ruby woke, got an SOS call from one of his girls, shaved, dressed, said good-bye to his dogs, drove downtown, parked his car illegally, walked over to the crowd and shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. The reader understands. He did it "for Jackie and the kids" and because he was Jack Ruby. With the same graphic immediacy the authors describe those first stunned minutes of disbelief after the murder, Ruby''s incomprehension of his position, his grotesque camaraderie with his old friends on the Dallas police force ("You all know me..."). The authors move jail to courtroom, catching the carnival atmosphere of Ruby''s trial--with brilliant portraits of defense attorney Belli and prosecutor Alexander--and finally to the hospital room where Ruby died. This book reveals Jack Ruby as no other has. It is a story of a marked life, of a man whose precarious sanity was destroyed by the events he created--who spent his last mortal strength trying to persuade the world that he did his duty as an American, a Texan, and a Jew when he killed the man who killed Kennedy.--From jacket flap

New York Times–bestselling author Garry Wills provides a provocative analysis of the theological and historical basis for the priesthood In a riveting and provocative tour de force from the author of What Jesus Meant, Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills poses the challenging question: Why did the priesthood develop in a religion that began without it and, indeed, was opposed to it? Why Priests? argues brilliantly and persuasively for a radical re-envisioning of the role of the church as the Body of Christ and for a new and better understanding of the very basis of Christian belief. As Wills emphasizes, the stakes for the writer and the church are high, for without the priesthood there would be no belief in an apostolic succession, the real presence in the Eucharist, the sacrificial interpretation of the Mass, and the ransom theory of redemption. This superb study of the origins of the priesthood stands as Wills’s towering achievement and will be of interest to all inquiring minds, believers and non-believers alike.

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two classical Roman plays. Garry Wills, focusing his attention on Julius Caesar, here demonstrates how Shakespeare so wonderfully made these ancient devices vivid, giving his characters their own personal styles of Roman speech. Shakespeare also makes Rome present and animate by casting his troupe of experienced players to make their strengths shine through the historical facts that Plutarch supplied him with. The result is that the Rome English-speaking people carry about in their minds is the Rome that Shakespeare created for them. And that is even true, Wills affirms, for today''s classical scholars with access to the original Roman sources.--From publisher description.

Gregory Skipwith belongs to a club of eighteenth-century scholars called At Buttons. The club and the New York Public Library where Gregory works should have protected him from violence, but it doesn''t. He finds himself confronted with murder and violence even in these dim places. When he and his strange crew of scholars try to cope with a conspiracy of conspiratorialists in New Orleans these reach their climax.

"For more than a decade, The Kennedy Imprisonment has stood as the definitive historical and psychological analysis of the Kennedy clan and its crippling conception of power. Written in 1981 on the heels of Edward M. Kennedy''s embarrassing 1980 presidential candidacy, this book by Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills contends that Edward''s failure was not a reversal of the Kennedys'' bright history, but its ironic fulfillment. In it Wills reveals a family who enjoyed public adulation but provided pale leadership; who experienced both stunning fame and tragic failure; whose core values ensnared its men - particularly JFK - in their own myths of success, toughness, and masculinity. How the Kennedys'' sense of power played out in their private and public lives - in their relationships with women and world leaders - provides the unifying principle of this fascinating study." "Now available with a new introduction by the author, this insightful and prescient analysis of the venerable yet vulnerable Kennedy family remains as relevant and accurate of ever."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

From one of America''s most distinguished historians comes this classic analysis of Richard Nixon. By considering some of the president''s opinions, Wills comes to the controversial conclusion that Nixon was actually a liberal. Both entertaining and essential, Nixon Agonistes captures a troubled leader and a struggling nation mired in a foolish Asian war, forfeiting the loyalty of its youth, puzzled by its own power, and looking to its cautious president for confidence. In the end, Nixon Agonistes reaches far beyond its assessment of the thirty-seventh president to become an incisive and provocative analysis of the American political machine. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The words that remade America.