The Tongue is Also a Fire by James Como out on New English Review Press

New English Review Press is pleased to announce the publication of our twentieth book, The Tongue is Also a Fire by James Como.

The term rhetoric is much abused these days ( Oh, that s just rhetoric! ), and the art it denotes doesn t fare much better. James Como has worked all his professional life to change that, one CUNY class at a time, and he carries on the good work in this book. He tells of his adventures in the classroom (some of them moving, some hilarious, some hair-raising), and then applies the tools of rhetoric to a variety of writers (Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis, Thornton Wilder), two politicians (Obama, LBJ), and our everyday conversations. Bonus: a loving, though not uncritical, tribute to Mickey Mantle.

— Linda Bridges, National Review editor-at-large, co-author of The Art of Persuasion: A National Review Rhetoric for Writers.

Rhetoric suffers now two unjust popular reputations, one bad, one banal. The bad: empty speech, as in It s nothing but a bunch of rhetoric. The banal: freshman comp. James Como knows it is neither meaningless speechifying toned up with stylistic flourishes nor the methodology for teaching barely literate undergraduates to write the language most of them have been speaking for most of their lives. Rhetoric, properly conceived, is a noble intellectual discipline reaching at least as far back as Aristotle and forward through the medieval Trivium and other stops to modern masters such as Richard Weaver, an ethical imperative for honesty and clarity in argument, explication and conversation. Professor Como belongs to, as he contributes to, that tradition. These essays are instructive and elegant. . . and entertaining: not many writers can arrange the cohabitation in the same book of St. John (the Logos man) and Mickey Mantle perhaps easy work for someone I once saw get Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy) and Branch Rickey into one paragraph.

— Samuel Hux, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, York College of The City University of New York, is a widely published essayist.