Elisabeth Le, The spiral ‘anti-Other rhetoric’: Discourses of identity and the international media echo. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. Pp. xii, 280. Hb $138.00.

Focusing on an analysis of editorials from The New York Times and Le Monde, as well as of those published in three Russian newspapers (Izvestija, Nezavisimaja Gazeta, and Segodnja) from 1999 to 2001, The spiral ‘anti-Other rhetoric’: Discourses of identity and the international media echo aims to explain how the phenomenon of international media echo (IME) functions. The book is based on an empirical study of interactions between French, American, and Russian media. As Le puts it at the very beginning, its aim is “a linguistic analysis in search of context theory in the domain of CDA, and a media / international relations inquiry in search of a linguistic method of analysis” (xi).

Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A history of the English language. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 494. Hb $140.

As languages change and show more flexibility, the need to update histories of languages such as English continues, as the editors of this book, Richard Hogg and David Denison, explain. The editors divide the book into two major parts distributed over nine chapters. One part deals with the fundamental aspects of the internal and structural history of English, and the other with the functions and varieties of the language.

Publications received (through 1 September 2007).

Editorial work on a volume of this journal typically starts a little over a year before the volume begins to appear with the February issue. Volume 36, which appeared in 2007, was assembled under the guidance of the Editorial Board that was in place in 2006. Thus this is the time to thank the members of the Editorial Board whose terms expired at the end of 2006 and those whose appointments began at the beginning of 2007, when work on the current volume began. Departing are Yolanda Lastra, Anita Pomerantz, Carol Myers-Scotton, Jef Verscheuren, and Don Zimmerman. All served Language in Society for many years, and their many contributions are gratefully acknowledged. New Editorial Board members beginning in January 2007 were Asif Agha (Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania), Geoffrey Raymond (Department of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara), Otto Santa Ana (Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, University of California at Los Angeles), and Jack Sidnell (Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto). All four have already contributed detailed, useful manuscript reviews and advice. Welcome to all!