Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

Great introduction to speeches and great selection. For any reader!

This book came referred to me from an excerpt from "Life's little instruction book" ...a series of little books with one paragraph "Words of wisdom" written by a dad, for his son, who was going off to college. (Which I also recommend). The dad, recommends to his son to read this book...so I bought it....it is a STELLAR compendium of the most compelling speeches in history. Simply fascinating. I have never heard of William Sapphire before, but I feel like he could have been a favorite college professor I never had! His own writing, I feel, is brilliant...and forces me t up my my vocabulary. I especially dig the fact that I can set the book down, to continue reading other novels I have queued up, and jump right back in to read more and more great speeches without missing a beat! HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

Love this book of great speeches. As soon as I started reading it I found thought provoking words of wisdom, something sorely lacking in today’s leaders, with only a few exceptions. But let’s not get political! It’s easy to digest a speech or two at a time, speeches that remind us of leaders who shaped the world we live in, and the qualities we should watch for in future leaders. It just feels good to exercise the mind a little, “hearing” these great orators of the past. Would recommend this book.

Lend Me Your Ears is a collection of more than two hundred of the world's greatest speeches. The speeches are arranged by broad themes (for example, "Political Speeches" and "Tributes and Eulogies").Every speech is preceded by a short introduction, including an analysis on what makes that speech great.In my opinion, this book and Copeland's The World's Great Speeches: Fourth Enlarged (1999) Edition are the two best currently-available anthologies in English of the world's great speeches.Having said that, I wish Lend Me Your Ears had included more speeches from Nobel laureates and from great scientists, writers and artists.I would also like to have seen more speeches from people from outside the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. In this globalizing world, we should be reading and hearing more speeches from representatives of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

This book is like a time machine. You travel from one important situation after another. Like a fly on the wall, you understand where you are, and why you have gathered, and what's at stake. And then it begins. Buddha. Jesus. Then Lenin, Stalin, Hitler. Louis Pasteur. Gandhi. JFK. TDR.Like Safire says "any speech by a living politician is hard to categorize as "great" until the speaker is elevated to icon hood". These speeches that vibrate with energy from the significance they have played. I read A LOT, never have history, politics become so immediate and alive than through this book.

Safire's collection is, without exception, the best set of speeches out there today. The only competition is Copeland's book and, while Copeland's is more wide-ranging and diverse, Safire reprints the speeches in their entirety. Enormously helpful. Has all of the ones you know should be in there - JFK, MLK, Reagan, Churchill, etc - but also some you wouldn't think of. The beauty of this book is that he prefaces each speech with his own commentary about WHY the speech is special. And, frankly, the introduction, where he opines about the 10 characteristics of a great speech, is worth the hernia you'll get picking up this hefty volume.

The first edition was, and remains, the criterion reference for anyone interested and what makes Amy given speech great (as opposed to simply good or even very good). Safire makes accessible to us a body of speeches that commented on, and sometimes made, history. The revised and expanded edition still contains the great speeches of the earlier edition, together with additional speeches worthy of the appellation "great". A fine bedside companion, it also is a worthy travel companion -- but only if weight is not a consideration!

As a compilation it is probably up there with the classics; it certainly isn't limited by genre, time, space, or ideology. And it has most of the classics, just to make the rhetoric professor comfortable in using it as a sourcebook.The real gems are safire's comments; they are the most pleasurable parts of the work. His writing is so clear, yet sufficiently nuanced that one can't pin him down as playing favorites even when one knows that he would find the speaker or the speech (or both) completely reprehensible.See, in particular, his comments to Rabbi Stephen Wise's speech at a Lincoln Memorial ceremony. It is the type of material than one can truly savor and enjoy.