This book is so far to the right it makes Ronald Reagan look like a Neo-Liberal. The assumptions the text makes about the classical speaker-subject "transmitting" a message to a "critical" listening audience is so passe and laughably bankrupt the text should be shredded and used as filler for a big GOP elephant. Seriously, if you want to learn about rhetoric there are plently of well written textbooks for college educated audiences that do make the simplistic assumption and fabulous fallacies that comprise this textbook.

i must agree with the reviewer from North Carolina. this is supposed to be a textbook written to teach about public speaking. however, the author took every opportunity to spread his left wing political views instead of concentrating on the subject matter. if an author needs to use examples to prove his academic point, then the examples should be somewhat balanced instead of being entirely offensive to a portion of the audience. if you are not a left wing extremist, it is very easy to get into such disagreement with this author's political views that the academic lesson is obscured. in short, this book is not so much a public speaking textbook as it is a platform for left wing political ranting. it would better serve as a textbook if the class subject matter was political extremism.

Great information inside. I learned alot about writting as well as speaking!