How to write about rhetoric without mentioning rhetoric
A quick question for those of you who visit regularly: has anyone picked up Howard Gardner's new book? (Gardner is familiar to me as the "multiple intelligences" guy.) His new book, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds, is freshly out--I saw it in Borders today, and was about as stunned as I was to read Richard Lanham's Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style. In other words, it looked to me like another book that would discuss rhetoric without actually mentioning it. It was published by Harvard's Business Press, and looks like yet another attempt to translate my field into corporate-speak.
Thanks to Amazon's handy dandy search function, I did find out that the word rhetoric appears some 13 times, and in a couple of cases, even looks to be used correctly. Even so, I'm suspicious. And curious to hear if anyone's taken a look yet...