From Booklist
The author of popular works on American speech (e.g.,
How We Talk: American Regional English Today, 2000), Metcalf presents a lighthearted journey through the rhetoric of our country's 43 presidents, critiquing their abilities as orators and their idiosyncrasies of accent and locution. Their speechwriters also come in for discussion, but Metcalf largely bends his ear to the presidential utterance, whether composed by the speaker or not. Collectively speaking, presidents are divided into two categories, those declaiming before the invention of sound recording and those after. The former more naturally wear the orator's toga, Metcalf rating John Adams as the best but awarding a consolation prize to one postphonograph president, the Great Bloviator himself, Warren G. Harding. Today we think of presidential speech as communication rather than oration, a style whose best exponents, Metcalf decides, have been FDR and Ronald Reagan. For verbal inventiveness, the author says Thomas Jefferson is tops, although he is weirdly rivaled by the "misunderestimated" George W. Bush. An entertaining and fast read for history buffs.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
Perhaps more than anyone else, politicians are what they say and how they say it. In Presidential Voices, Metcalf examines both how the presidents have spoken to the American public and how the American public has wanted its presidents to speak. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Metcalf shows what contemporaries have said about the chief speakers in the White House. He explores the distinctive words that our presidents favored (and in many cases coined), along with the regional accents that livened the Oval Office. In addition, he uncovers the hidden influence of speechwriters and the changing media on how presidents present themselves to voters. He concludes his survey of presidential speech with entertaining linguistic portraits of all forty-three presidents. From Silent Cal to the Great Communicator, Presidential Voices sheds new and original light on the ways in which our commanders in chief have commanded the language. After reading this book, you will never again take what our president says for granted.
