I picked this up in the Oxfam shop thinking
it would be a good read – sadly I was disappointed.
Sat on the beach I noticed the review on
the back comparing it to Naomi Klein’s No Logo and my heart sank – in my
opinion No Logo is a massively over hyped collection of tautologies and non-sequiturs
and while the reviewer meant the comparison as a complement, for my own reasons
it equally stands up.
My first complaint is that Steven Poole
puts forward “Unspeak” as some radical new idea, and in particular drawing a
distinction between in and Orwellian doublethink, however nothing beyond the
introduction backs up “Unspeak” as anything new. “Unspeak” as a concept adds nothing to our
analytical tool kit on the politicized use or abuse of language.
The second complaint is that Poole gets stuck in a rut on the “war on terror”. He begins well with balanced analysis of the
language games around anti-social behaviour in chapter 2 and climate
change/global warming in chapter 3 but then from chapter 4 to 9 it is all the
“war on terror”. This completely
unbalances the content of the book and worse still Poole
gets distracted from his topic, language, and mostly just grinds an anti-Bush
axe. I would almost be interested to see
how Poole would update this 2005 book to deal
with the Obama era discourse on the “war on terror”.
While not all the examples that Poole
quotes were to me as convincing or convicting as he believes it is not that I really
object to most of the analysis, the US government (like everyone else) clearly
tries to frame the scope of any discussion on its action by setting the terms
that are used. The “but” comes because
this is really nothing new and nor it was it a big secret that Poole discovered and need to share to enlighten the
world.
Some books are important and need to be
read, while others are no more than a waste of good trees. Sadly Poole
has written the later.
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