Lincoln at Gettysburg, The Words that Remade America

Press Reviews

Here's what book reviewers have to say about Lincoln at Gettysburg. The full reviews are available to Gettysburg College users only. If you are off-campus, you can set up off-campus access to Gettysburg's online databases.

"Now, in a brilliant book that surpasses anything written before about the Gettysburg Address, Garry Wills offers stunning new ideas about the structure of the speech, its subliminal message in Lincoln's time and its historical meaning for America today. By reinterpreting the speech's origins and language, Mr. Wills takes risk after risk that makes "Lincoln at Gettysburg" a challenging journey for the reader." --Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, July 1, 1992 (Online fulltext available in LexisNexis for Gettysburg College users)

"This book is more than a study of the Gettysburg Address. Garry Wills uses the Address to make a larger argument about Lincoln's political thought and the American political regime."
--Kenneth Cmiel, American Historical Review, October 1993, p.1323. (Online fulltext available in JSTOR for Gettysburg College users)

"...Wills deftly sets the scene of the president's appearance on the raised platform at the uncompleted burial site at Gettysburg and treats his employment of lofty words as a tactic that enabled him to transfigure the tragedy to which the fresh mounds of earth in the cemetery bore witness."
--Kenneth S. Lynn, The Washington Post, June 14, 1992 (Online fulltext available in LexisNexis for Gettysburg College users)

"Lincoln at Gettysburg, an exhilaratingly interesting work of history and literary criticism, proves that, however much divine or aesthetic grace suffused Lincoln during the hours and days he spent on the speech, ''all his prior literary, intellectual, and political labors had prepared him for the intellectual revolution contained in those 272 words.''
--Robert Wilson, USA Today, June 12, 1992 (Online fulltext available in LexisNexis for Gettysburg College users)