"Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword."--Bulwer-Lytton (1838). What truth this double entendre aphorism holds rattles around in two spacious anthologies from the Safire word factory. "Clear your mind of cant," says Samuel Johnson, advice with which his many companions in counseling in Good Advice might agree. No mere mimics of similar pithiness, each writer in this quotational dictionary puts out a memorable or utilitarian paragraph. Practicing writers can consult their wisdom, posted like orders of the day, on technical skills such as slaying euphemisms, passive constructions, and bad opening lines (an availment that could have profited Bulwer-Lytton, also of "It was a dark and stormy night" infamy). They know what work habits work, such as writing limericks to overcome writer's block. Will it turn the trick for you? It did for Erskine Caldwell. "Rule" expressed as governance marches through Safire's second anthology, and is almost always exercised or justified by that potent type of writing, the oration. The speech is not in the main a logical recitation of facts, figures and events. It's not a news report following the who, what, why, where, and how. It is an ad hominem appeal that lawyers (say they) hate, a pleading to the audience's emotional or native sense of the right, the honorable, or the sacred. Safire prefaces each of the 250 orations with an active headline, a historical set-up, and a comment on its forensic elements. Inveighing or imploring, for or against, these speeches all take a stand, be the issue momentous or transitory, be the stakes the life of a nation or the life of a dog. The browser will find eulogies to both.To teach and to please, some Greek once advised, is the function of great rhetoric, and Safire has put together two volumes that embody those functions and their power. ~--Gilbert Taylor

The third edition of this comprehensive collection of oratory through the ages is appropriately edited by former presidential speechwriter Safire?a man who knows firsthand the importance of putting together the right words for the right moment. But many readers will no doubt skip his prefatory lesson in rhetoric and go right to the speeches themselves. The selections range widely through Western history, from Pericles?s funeral oration to fallen Greek soldiers in the Peloponnesian War, to Tony Blair ?exhort[ing] his party to fight terrorism.? History has yet to pass judgment on the greatness of the most recent speeches included here, but Safire shows a broad-minded, bipartisan inclusiveness in collecting the words of Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, history?s losers (Sen. Robert Taft opposing war crimes trials after WWII) as well as its victors. And several of the speeches he includes deal with politics only indirectly: such as Louis Pasteur?s paean to scientific education, the Dalai Lama?s sermon on the ?Philosophy of Compassion? and Salman Rushdie?s description of a life ?Trapped inside a Metaphor.? This is an invaluable reference for writers and speakers, students of history and those who simply appreciate great oratory. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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