This ambitious new encyclopedia covers rhetoric from all times and places in some 200 signed entries by 120 scholarly contributors from around the world. Bibliographies are appended to each article, and the index and a Synoptic Outline of Contents provide fine access points. Typical articles include "Public Speaking," "Queer Rhetoric," "Synecdoche," and "Science." This work abstracts rhetoric from people, places, and cultures in search of the "principles" of rhetoric, excluding, for example, entries for relevant historical figures. This emphasis on the abstract differentiates it from the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition (Garland, 1996), which has more than twice as many entries in about the same number of pages and includes, for example, entries for people. Though these two excellent books often duplicate each other, both include information and insights not found in the other. Libraries serving patrons concerned with the art and history of rhetoric should have both. Given the high price of both books, other libraries will have to choose between the practicality of the older one and the more theoretical emphasis of the newer one.

The Callan Method is based on actual classroom practice, on the psychological teacher-student relationship, and on their relationship to the language. When the Method was shown to some educational psychologists, one of them said "How else?". In other words, as language learning is a question of developing quick reflexes, how else can this be done than by a system of stimulus and response? The same psychologist went on to take an exaggerated example, by adding that one could teach a monkey to play the piano, given such techniques.

Gerry's Vocabulary Teacheris a simple database program intended for language teachers. It enables you to create and store word lists with an associated set of example sentences for each word, and the example sentences can be used to create a variety of different gapfill exercises for printing or completion on the Web. It is distributed with Gerry Luton's original database, which consists of over 2500 headwords and 34,000 sentences for learners of English. The database is provided in British, Canadian and American English.