Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders. - book reviews

National Review, May 16, 1994 by Richard Brookhiser

By Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, 323 pp, $2k

IN THE introduction to this odd volume, Garry Wills asks A successful leaders are superior beings who impose themselves on men and events, and answers, sensibly, that things are more complicated than that: "Most literature on leadership is unitarian. But life is trinitarian. One-legged and two-legged chairs do not, of themselves, stand. A third leg is needed. Leaders, followers, and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership." This promising beginning is followed by 16 essays on disparate figures--Socrates to Cesare Borgia--who are supposed to represent different types of leaders. The quality of the essays is as various as their subjects; the chapter on Dorothy Day, the Catholic radical, is the best. The book is equal parts scholasticism, journalism, and self-help--as if Thomas Aquinas had been asked to rewrite The Management Secrets of Attila the Hun for The Atlantic Monthly.