Choice Review

According to Young, George Orwell's description of language in the service of power in Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and in his essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946) accurately portrays the most important characteristics of the language of 20th-century totalitarian regimes. In a clear and graceful argument, he compares Orwell's model of "Newspeak" to linguistic practice in Nazi Germany and in the former Soviet Union, finding many more similarities than differences among the three. As a descriptive catalog of terms, slogans, styles of expression, and propagandistic tactics, the book is first-rate. Its theoretical sophistication, however, is disappointingly meager, and some readers may find the author disconcertingly naive in supposing that the political communication environment of Western countries is largely untouched by Orwell's critique. The bibliography is extensive, and indexing superb. Upper-division undergraduates. A. P. Simonds; University of Massachusetts at Boston