Details
Synopsis
Although he died in 1979, John Wayne remains the archetype of the American cowboy. In this biographical study, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gary Wills traces the path by which the famed American actor became the emblem of Americans' idealized self-understanding in a culture largely devoid of historical traditions.
| Size | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 12.8 oz |
Industry Reviews
"...Mr. Wills brings his usual acumen and fluency to this discussion..."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (02/21/1997)
"'John Wayne's America' is deeply satisfying at every level, form sending us back refreshed to a new appreciation of great movies to deepening our understanding of the forces of cultural production. Read it, pilgrims."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Michael Stern (02/23/1997)
"In this latest book, both the range of [Wills'] learning and his delight in making unexpected connections are abundantly apparent."
New York Observer - Adam Begley (03/03/1997)
"Wills is, as is also commonly known, a meticulous scholar and a lucid writer. Both characteristics are evident here. But unlike the books upon which his reputation rests, this one is largely the elucidation, at far too great a length, of the obvious. By contrast with Wills's deservedly honored 'Lincoln at Gettysburg', which is almost as much a model of brevity as the great speech it analyzes, 'John Wayne's America' is flabby and dull. In detail that too often passes from the revealing to the stupefying, Wills discusses the particulars of Wayne's films, both famous and forgotten, yet in the end he tells us nothing significant about Wayne that we did not already know."
Washington Post Book World - Jonathan Yardley (03/02/1997)
"To his credit and our continuing edification, Garry Wills, polymath extraordinaire, is no snob. He has that rare quality, more common to French intellectuals than our own, of refusing to be bound by categories of importance. As much at home with the rhetoric of Cicero as with the paradoxes of Presidential politics and the arcana of obscure Hollywood westerns of the 1920's, he brings the full weight of his erudition to bear on John Wayne as a symbol of manhood fore generations of Americans--what he terms the embodiment of an American Adam, "untrammeled, unspoiled, free to roam," Wayne, he says, is an eligiac figure who stands astride a perpetually receding, endlessly idealized frontier....Indeed, Mr Wills sets himself a perverse, paradoxical task: to rescuer Wayne from both his idolaters and his detractors and, while doing so, to disabuse the film cognoscenti of a couple of presumably cherished myths....I hope this new book will find its way into the hands of those who are ready to think seriously about a pivotal figure in our culture, a figure who was a great star and a flawed man."
New York Times Book Review - Molly Haskell
"The story of how [Wayne's] image of a war-fighting man came to be--the story, in fact of how most images come to be--is normally a subject neither for biographers nor for critics, even though everyone agrees that we live in an age of the dominant image. A biography of an image is a much-needed project for our times. And who better to write about the Wayne image than our best popular historian of the ways in which religion intersected with politics, from the nation's founding to the campaign trail...from the battlefield to the graveyard....As a writer who has warned intellectuals that they ignore the fundamental (as well as fundamentalist) importance of religion at their own risk, there is a logic to his special interest in Wayne another ignored but popular phenomenon....Garry Wills is a remarkable writer who has a wonderful idea for a biography appropriate to our times. Thing of 'John Wayne's America' as the first test run of a not yet perfected form."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Tom Engelhardt (03/02/1997)
"This book is vexing but endearing."
Spectator - John Bowen (05/03/1997)
"No one has written better about the cultural ideology of John Wayne's career than Wills does here....Wills's sensitivity to the larger implications of John Wayne as an 'auteur des politiques' is superb."
advertisement - Boston Globe
"Not only is this stunning book essential reading for anyone interested in Wayne and popular culture, it's a key text in Wills's continuing investigation into the meaning of America."
Redmond
"A major achievement in cultural criticism that will not be easily surpassed."
Matthews
"If this book is not Wills at his absolute finest, that is largely because he co-stars in it with John Wayne. The trouble is not that wayne dwarfs Wills--he doesn't--but that the myth of John Wayne comes apart at a single touch, as, of course, most celluloid myths tend to do."
Diggins
"Wills has done us the service of unpacking one of the biggest bundles ever."
O'Rourke
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
All rights reserved.
