What We Talk About When We Talk About War

An Amazon.ca Editor's Pick for 2012 and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2012Shortlisted, Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and John W. Dafoe Book PrizeLonglisted, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-FictionA provocative examination of how communications has shaped the language of the media, and vice versa, and how rhetoric shapes how Canadians thinks of themselves as a nation and Canada's engagement in peacekeeping, war, and on the international stage. According to Richler, each phase of engagement in Afghanistan has been shaped not only by rhetoric but an overarching narrative structure. This topic is very much in discussion at the moment. With the withdrawal of Canadian troops (at least in part) from Afghanistan, it becomes clear there had been a rhetorical cycle. Where once Canada wielded the myth of itself as a peacekeeping nation, the past decade has seen a marked shift away from this, emphasizing the Canadian soldier as wa