Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama

by Sam Leith

Overview

A hilariously entertaining exploration of how people have taught, practiced and thought about rhetoric—the art of persuasion—from Aristotle to Obama.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465096688
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	04/26/2016
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	333,421
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Sam Leith is a former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, and contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal, Prospect, Guardian, Evening Standard and Spectator. He lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

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. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Leith's great gift is the ability to plunder the everyday to illustrate the rarefied.... He describes the development of rhetoric beautifully, and even after the most cursory dip into this, you begin to hear the world in a completely different,
illuminated way."—Telegraph (UK)

"Elegant, concise and frequently very funny."—Spectator (UK)

"It is through a welter of colloquial examples and eccentric line readings that the book really comes alive.... While the formal study of rhetoric might have collapsed under its own weight, Leith offers a slimmed-down version that is sure to enlighten."—Financial Times (UK)

"Leith attempts to reclaim rhetoric with a breezy book that sprays around examples from history, politics and popular culture to outline the building blocks of public speech, flitting happily from Cicero to J-Lo, from Hitler to Homer Simpson.... Leith's often engaging examples lighten any sense of learning."—The Observer (UK)

"Engrossing.... When it comes to Obama, Leith's scrutiny is painstaking and he is especially illuminating on Obama's debts to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther
King."-—Independent (UK)

undefined—The London Evening Standard (UK)

"This isn't your parents'
rhetoric primer.... Irreverent and funny, Words Like Loaded
Pistols is filled with tongue-in-cheek witticisms, slang and unexpected illustrations.... As political rhetoric builds toward November,
Leith's subject will be unavoidable. For the coming months, friends, Buckeyes,
countrymen, ready your ears."—Plain Dealer

"[A] rambunctious handbook of rhetoric...funny, friendly pages."—Wilson Quarterly

"[A] fascinating examination of the power of words."—Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review

"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.... Leith can be fiendishly entertaining."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Former Daily Telegraph literary editor Leith (The Coincidence Engine, 2012, etc.) brings to life a forgotten but eternally essential subject. "What is democracy," asks the author, "but the idea that the art of persuasion should be formally enshrined at the center of the political process?" The art and science of persuasion, so central to politics, the law, literature, love and, indeed, human society itself, has fallen on hard times. Once the capstone of the triumvirate--grammar, logic, rhetoric--that formed the basis of a liberal education, rhetoric is now seen as something to be distrusted, and its place in the academy has been supplanted by upstarts like critical theory and linguistics. Leith uses every tool in the rhetorician's arsenal to argue for rhetoric's continuing relevance (even disdain for rhetoric is a transparently rhetorical device, for "the most effective rhetoric is often the least obviously rhetorical"). His contention that "[e]xplaining rhetoric to a human being is, or should be, like explaining water to a fish" is somewhat belied by his use of extensive use of such terms as pleonasm, hypallage, enargia and zeugma. However, persistent readers will gain a great deal of insight into how humans use communication to get what they want. With chapters on each of the five parts of rhetoric and the three branches of oratory, and spotlights on "champions of rhetoric" from Satan to Obama, the book fulfills Cicero's three objectives of rhetoric: "to move, educate, and delight." Required reading for aspiring writers, lawyers, politicians and marketers.

Kirkus Reviews