"Imagine four separate critical anthologies, all excellent and useful, each devoted to a specialized subject area within a broad disciplinary topic, and each containing a useful survey of the subject's historical context and intellectual pedigree and a brief introduction to the ensuing articles that demonstrate the current thinking within the field from a variety of useful perspectives. Combine these hypothetical titles into a single volume, add a statement of scope and purpose that combines personal history with an excellent survey of the intellectual and academic milieu out of which the specialized subjects arose, and one has the present title. Lunsford (Stanford), Wilson (Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities), and Eberly (Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park) offer 32 chapters in four divisions: "Historical Studies in Rhetoric," "Rhetoric across the Disciplines," "Rhetoric and Pedagogy," and "Rhetoric and Public Discourse." The many contributors remind the reader that rhetoric today is an ever-expanding, inclusive subject best characterized as an interdisciplinary creature ranging freely across (and even beyond) the fields of English, composition and writing, and communications. In its theory and applied practice, rhetoric has become something greater than the Greeks imagined, something better identified as meta-rhetoric, unlimited by its current conception and reevaluation of what "rhetorical" means. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."

A.P. Church

Dickinson State University

CHOICE magazine