Great Moments From Great Speeches

Spanning the years 1933-1993, this compilation of excerpts from great speeches opens with Franklin Roosevelt's First Inaugural ("the only thing we have to fear is fear itself") and closes with what may be Bill Clinton's only Inaugural, made way back in 1993 when he was still a Democrat in practice as well as by party affiliation. Whether Bill's speech will make it into a revised version of this program released in 2050 remains to be seen, but the other 28 are pretty solid choices. Averaging under 5 minutes each, the speeches are a good mix of classics, such as Hitler, Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nixon (both the "Checkers" speech and the resignation), and some off-the-beaten-soundtrack choices like Barbara Jordan, Geraldine Ferraro, Golda Meir, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin. Helpful voice-over narration and period images set the context for many of the speeches. Although abridged, these clips serve as a good reference collection, and would probably be most useful in that capacity in public libraries. But the primary audience for this tape is junior and senior high schools. Recommended. (R. Pitman)