Words Like Loaded Pistols
Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
"An entertaining history of great oratory" and a primer to rhetoric's key techniques (The New Yorker).
Rhetoric gives our words the power to inspire. But it's not just for politicians: it's all around us, whether you're buttering up a key client or persuading your children to eat their vegetables. You have been using rhetoric yourself, all your life. After all, you know what a rhetorical question is, don't you?
In Words Like Loaded Pistols, Sam Leith traces the art of argument from ancient Greece down to its many modern mutations. He introduces verbal villains from Hitler to Richard Nixon—and the three musketeers: ethos, pathos and logos. He explains how rhetoric works in speeches from Cicero to Obama, and pays tribute to the rhetorical brilliance of AC/DC's "Back In Black". Before you know it, you'll be confident in chiasmus and proud of your panegyrics— because rhetoric is useful, relevant, and absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Timed for a presidential election year, this sassy, smart book outlines and illustrates nearly every rhetorical trope and flourish related to the art of persuasion. Following precepts gleaned from the masters of this art, Leith can be fiendishly entertaining while he goes against the grain of our age, one in which rhetoric is generally looked upon with the same suspicion that Plato viewed the Sophists: as spin doctors of their day. Modern America's discomfort with anything but plain style or memorization makes it even more difficult for hopeful practitioners to gain traction in the traditional craft of oral communication. A study of Hitler's oratory and a priceless analysis of Richard Nixon's "Checkers Speech" further prove one of the central tenets of this anxiety: "Rhetoric's effectiveness is, in the final analysis, independent of its moral content or that of its users." Thus, the lessons of Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Quintilian, Lincoln, Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., presidents Obama and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, and others, provide the foundation for a potential resurgence of this craft.
