In Our Own Words bears witness to the forces that swept our nation -- two World Wars, Prohibition, the Depression, the Cold War, the Civil Rights era, Vietnam, the Reagan era, and beyond -- and features the voices of Theodore Roosevelt * Booker T. Washington * Mark Twain * Emma Goldman * Woodrow Wilson * Marcus Garvey * Oliver Wendell Holmes * George S. Patton * Pearl Buck * Orson Welles * Jackie Robinson * Joseph McCarthy * Rachel Carson * Vince Lombardi * Barry Goldwater * John F. Kennedy * J. Edgar Hoover * Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. * Malcolm X * Richard M. Nixon * Frank Zappa * Elie Wiesel * Charlton Heston * Ryan White * Duke Ellington * Billy Graham * Barbara Jordan * Bill Clinton * Cesar Chavez * Helen Keller...and dozens of others who tell the story of their age from their podiums and soapboxes, courtrooms and convention halls.
Classic speeches from JFK, Reagan, MLK, Clinton, etc will keep you interested, and some other speeches will put you to sleep. The point is - you will know more about our world, and the USA if you check out this book.
Joseph Dworak
For example, in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy, an speech is excerpted from both parties. There's nothing wrong with that, but in the author's/editor's commentary to set up the speech, Hill's speech is given the description "equally as compelling". Which again, I say is fine, if they wanted to go that route to highlight both sides with similar force.
But then cut to a later pair of passages, first with Sarah Brady (emphasized as "Registered Republican") speaking at the 1996 Democratic National Convention about handgun control, and then excerpting a speech from Charlton Heston on behalf of the NRA ("Although many Americans consider the organization's positions extreme" -- p. 427) opposing the measure.
I'm not familiar with the immediate politics of the earlier periods to say what kind of bias, if any, is reflected by the editorial comments in this account of history, but there's a level of trust between author/editor and reader that, if breached, can justify the reader in dismissing wholesale the commentary for lack of integrity rather than an innocent bias. Perhaps if this book had been completed a year or two later than it was (1999), the perspective of recent history may have been a little different.
But for the speeches themselves, I can't complain. It's a decent resource not only for its substance, but also for a guide to drafting good oratory.
