Outside Looking In

Garry Wills is one of our last public intellectuals, educated people who think about the issues of the day and share their thoughts in understandable language. In that role he has met a lot of interesting people. His book is not a memoir but a group portrait of some who were the most interesting and some who have had the greatest influence on him--his wife and his father, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Studs Terkel among them. Wills is more of a reader than a performer. He sounds a little stiff in spots, pronouncing his words carefully, but his genuine affection for his subjects and the way he reveals himself in talking about them win us over in the end. D.M.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine