Robin Lakoff gets to the heart of one of the most fascinating and pressing issues in American society today: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a brilliant and vastly entertaining discussion of news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space--political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O. J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the Clinton sex scandal--Lakoff shows that the struggle for power and status at the end of the century is being played out as a war over language. Controlling language is a basis for all power, she says, and therefore it is worth fighting for. As a result, newly emergent groups, especially blacks and women, are contending with middle- to upper-class white men for a share in "language rights."

Since the appearance of the first edition in 1979, A History of German Literature has established itself as a classic work and basic reference source for those interested or in contact with German literature.
In this book, the subject of German literature is treated as a phenomenon firmly rooted in the social and political world from which it has risen. Social forces and their interrelation with the artistic avant-garde are an organizing theme of this history, which traces German literature from its first beginnings in the Middle Ages to the present day. This latest edition has been updated to cover the reunification of Germany, and its consequent events.

This book is a comprehensive but accessible description of English as it is spoken in New Zealand. New Zealand English is one of the youngest native speaker varieties of English, and is the only variety of English where there is recorded evidence of its entire history. It shares some features with other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English such as Australian English and South African English, but is also clearly distinct from these.