For Garry Wills, reading is a political act, a complicated, historically embedded performance that re-imagines--simultaneously reinforcing and revising--the political and ethical structures that shape community. Trained as a classical scholar and...

Garry Wills' "Reagan's America" (Penguin, $8.95), Christopher J. Matthews wrote in these pages last year, "does to 'the Great Communicator' what he once did brilliantly to Richard Nixon." Wills' study of the president's Midwestern roots and California career "lets friend and foe alike see...

New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc. 185 pp., $20.00, ISBN 0-8050-6905-4 Publication Date: April 2002 In his eight-page introduction, Garry Wills, the prolific and prize-winning author, dissects James Madison's failures as president, emphasizing his committeeman temperament, his provincialism, his naivete, his...

Like the conductor of his own chamber orchestra, Garry Wills presides over three metal music stands while at work in his study, his chosen "scores" including dictionaries of Greek, Latin and Italian.He might need, for example, to look up the Greek word "ekklesia," which appears...

On the 100th anniversary of John Wayne's birth, the Duke still swaggers through the American psyche as not just an actor, but a patriot _ his centennial spawning fond remembrance, and perhaps a few small protests on the side.Wayne's legacy is unique because of the...