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Joseph S. Tuman, COMMUNICATING TERROR: THE RHETORICAL DIMENSIONS OF TERRORISM. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003; pp. 176, $64.95 hardcover, ISBN: 0761927654; $29.95 paper, ISBN: 0761927662.
Joseph Tuman's Communicating Terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism introduces concepts from rhetorical and communication theory and seems especially suited for students who are studying rhetoric, public discourse, and the role of the mass media and have some familiarity with the social sciences. What spurred the book was the question why September 11, 2001, had the effect it did when other cases of terrorism did not have such an effect. Tuman states that the book "will examine how terrorism is most fundamentally understood as a communication process with rhetorical dimensions" (p. xi).
Tuman seems especially interested ill the role and impact of terms. Indeed, chapter 1 is entitled "The Struggle to Define Terrorism." He begins each chapter defining key terms, with the terms terrorism and rhetoric receiving extensive discussion. Although knowing a term's definition is important, the sheer number of such definitions can become a bit bewildering and overly abstract. Tuman could have spent more time looking at the stakes involved in privileging one term over another. The process of defining certain terms, such as terrorism (pp. 1-15), rhetoric (p. 24), definitions and labels (pp. 32-33), symbols (p. 47), and mass media (116-117), and not others, such as ideology (p. 4), operationalized (p. 33), and marginalized...