From the San Francisco Chronicle
Nonfiction review: 'Talking Dangerously'
By Michael S. Roth
Geoffrey Nunberg's new collection of essays and commentaries explores how we have attempted to combine, divide or dismiss parts of the world simply by talking about them. Nunberg focused on the "end of the Bush era," but he is not limited to the gyrations of political speech.
Happily, the UC Berkeley linguistics professor and NPR commentator casts his net widely, for he knows "there are subtle shifts in sensibility that would be hard to pin down if the language didn't give them away." Language reveals these changes only when you learn how to pay attention to it. It would be hard to find a better guide for paying attention to the revelatory dimensions of language than Nunberg....