Britain and Europe at a Crossroads. The Politics of Anxiety and Transformation, by Andrew Ryder (Bristol University Press, 2020)

This is an interesting and coherent book which offers a specific interpretation of Brexit by examining the political discourse and investigating its linguistic and rhetoric context. The author applies the method of critical discourse analysis, which links the micro analysis of speech acts (speeches, public statements, political adverts, and interviews) with a macro approach that critically assesses the relationship between speech acts and the historical and socio-economic profile of Britain. The Brexit debate is used as a case study to demonstrate that power is embodied in discourse and knowledge, and that sophisticated verbal constructs are capable of manipulating a range of dispositions, emotions, and identities to the extreme.

The Psalter in the Canon

The Psalter, read as a coherent book instead of being read as 150 independent poems, reveals some patterns and a continuum of ideas, which might not express the editors’ original intention, but support the readers’ understanding of this canonical book. The article suggests that, even if the majority of texts are laments, the Psalter is a book of praise, underlined for instance by the endings of the Psalter’s five books. The five books relate the Psalter to the Pentateuch, and a form of competition between David and Moses is found (see esp Book 4), of which David was the winner. This is one of the reasons why the Christians were able to read the Psalter as a Christian book.

Monopolies in America: Empire Builders and Their Enemies from Jay Gould to Bill Gates. By Charles R. Geisst. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x, 355. $30.00.

The basic problem with writing a history of American Big Business is finding some method to organize the familiar chronicles of companies and people as well as the usual stories of good and evil into some coherent book of reasonable length. The organizing method adopted by Charles Geisst is to focus on the popular reaction to “monopolies,” more accurately, private concentrations of economic power. For the most part, this method succeeds, assisted in no small part by Geisst's smooth style and cynical, perhaps jaded, attitude.