The Rhetoric of Manipulation: Unmasking Semantic Perversions

by Robert Harvey

216 pages, Paperback

Published March 20, 2025

Reviews

[Paul]

The author is obviously very knowledgeable about rhetoric and propaganda, but I personally found he interjected too many personal opinions, filled the pages with a greater amount of cynicism than I would have liked, and I finished the book feeling as if I should have read Victor Klemperer's source material.

[Dusty Bucket]

I'm reading a different book that explains a topic I am not familiar with in a very compelling way, and realized that I think what Harvey was missing is more of the "so what," or examples rooted in our everyday experience, so I can remember his explanations of what I notice in daily life.

It's been a second since I finished this, so maybe he had plenty of examples, but not much of this has had staying power in my mind. I think this topic is very interesting, and having an experience of not having actually absorbed his material used to make me feel it was my own "skill issue," but I have come to realize that the art of writing is to get people to truly internalize what is being explained.

I wanted to be able to use a deeper understanding of how rhetoric is used in current American politics for my own writing and overall media literacy. Maybe there will be a time to revisit this along with Klemperer, but I'll have to take my time and keep notes along the way.