The ways science and technology are portrayed in advertising, in the news, in our politics, and in the culture at large inform the way we respond to these particular facts of life. The better we are at recognizing the rhetorical intentions of the purveyors of information and promoters of mass culture, the more adept we become at responding intelligently to them. Flash Effect, a startling book by David J. Tietge, documents the manner in which those at the highest levels of our political and cultural institutions conflated the rhetoric of science and technology with the rhetorics of religion...

The ways science and technology are portrayed in advertising, in the news, in our politics, and in the culture at large inform the way we respond to these particular facts of life. The better we are at recognizing the rhetorical intentions of the purveyors of information and promoters of mass culture, the more adept we become at responding intelligently to them. Flash Effect, a startling book by David J. Tietge, documents the manner in which those at the highest levels of our political and cultural institutions conflated the rhetoric of science and technology with the rhetorics of religion...

RATIONAL RHETORIC: THE ROLE OF SCIENCE IN POPULAR DISCOURSE places popular representations of science and scientific discourse under the terministic lenses of rhetorical theory, cultural studies, and language theory. DAVID J. TIETGE ranges broadly and insightfully across a wide range of scientific discourse and ideology as it is reconfigured for general consumption, in popular science writing (from Carl Sagan to Stephen Hawking and Stephen J. Gould), magazines (from Scientific American to Time and Social Text), news media (from CNN to The Discovery Channel), the public controversies over...