Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama

An entertaining history of great oratory and a primer to rhetoric's key techniques (The New Yorker). In Words Like Loaded Pistols Sam Leith traces the art of persuasion beginning in ancient Syracuse and taking us up to the Twitterverse. Along the way he follows detours as varied and fascinating as Elizabethan England Milton's Satanic realm the Springfield of Abraham Lincoln and the Springfield of Homer Simpson. He explains how language has been used by the great heroes of rhetoric (such as Cicero and Martin Luther King Jr.) as well as some villains (like Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon.) You'll find out how to build your own memory-palace; you'll be introduced to the Three Musketeers: Ethos Pathos and Logos; and you'll learn how to use chiasmus with confidence and occultation without thinking about it. Most importantly of all you will discover that rhetoric is useful relevant -- and something you can master.