William Safire has a new edition of "Lend Me your Ears" (W.W. Norton & Co. 2004) — his 1,000 page compendium of the “Great Speeches in History.” It belongs in every library.
The volume starts with Pericles, who "Extols the Glory That is Greece at the Funeral of Its Fallen Sons" (“Those . . . have the greatest souls, who, most acutely sensible of the miseries of war and the sweets of peace, are not hence in the least deterred from facing danger”) — a speech made more than 2,500 years ago. It ends with several undelivered speeches, including John F. Kennedy’s extraordinary speech prepared for delivery in Dallas on November 22, 1963 (“We in this country, in this generation, are — by destiny rather than choice — the watchmen on the walls of world freedom”).
In between is remarkable speech after remarkable speech — including many of special relevance to Jewish history: Menachem Begin’s speech on the eve of the formation of Israel, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s Tribute to Lincoln, Emile Zola’s defense of Dreyfus, Anatoly Shcharansky’s defiant address to his Soviet judges before his sentencing, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein’s sermon at the White House, Anwar el-Sadat’s speech to the Knesset, Yitzhak’s Rabin’s speech on the White House Lawn, and more.
Each speech is preceded by an invaluable historical note by Safire. The book is an historical tour through the words that have marked the great moments of recorded events, bringing the events alive with an eloquence that moves the reader — as in fact the speeches were originally intended to do. As Safire advises with respect to these "immortal" addresses:
Do not begin by mining the gold in this book’s speeches for nuggets, sound bites, or slight nibbles. Instead, place yourself in the moments they were spoken, in the places where the orator stood, and then read them, silently or aloud, for their content. . . . [T]hey were spoken by mortals to move other mortals.
It is a truly wonderful volume.