Centered on critical language study, Language and power in the modern world aims to “reveal and challenge aspects of the intense socialization to which we are all subjected, not only through language but also about language” (p. 4). The authors begin with a relatively brief introduction to the concept of power, leaning heavily on Foucault as interpreted by, especially, Norman Fairclough. The introduction, while focused on power, delves into Critical Discourse Analysis and the critical (socio)linguistics literatures to situate a quick overview of the book, which is organized around five chapters: “Language and the media,” “Language and organisations,” “Language and gender,” “Language and youth,” and “Multilingualism, ethnicity and identity.” In each chapter, the authors present an initial review essay of 11 to 20 pages, followed by an “activities” section, which typically presents two or three suggested tasks for students. The bulk of each chapter, however, is the set of four or five (edited) readings of primary sources relevant to the chapter's topic. The readings, regularly addressed in the earlier chapters as “Reading 1.2” or “Reading 2.3,” often with no title or author noted, are the best part of this book. The reading selections are quite recent, with only one title published before 1995, allowing the reader to catch up on some outstanding primary research that takes the five topic areas well beyond the classic studies of the 1970s and 1980s. The authors' choice of readings is well considered and fulfills their goal not to “promote one approach over another, [but] rather to illustrate a variety of approaches to the study of language and power” (4).

This book brings together an excellent array of articles which more or less closely follow the chapters' titles, although there is considerable slippage in respect to where a given excerpt might fit best. For example, selections for chap. 1, “Language and media,” could just as easily have been repositioned under different chapters: Mary Talbot's (1995) excerpt from “A synthetic sisterhood: False friends in a teenage magazine” might have been placed in either “Language and gender” or “Language and youth”; both excerpts from Ian Hutchby, “The organization of talk on radio” (1991) and Confrontation talk: Arguments, asymmetries and power on talk radio (1996), could have been used for “Language and organisations.” The readings for “Language and youth” could have been put as a whole under a heading such as “Language and emerging identities,” or even subsumed under of “Multilingualism, ethnicity and identity.” The authors write of “overlapping themes across chapters,” especially media and gender, but it would appear that their overwhelming interests are in the areas of gender inequality and interethnic conflict, reflecting in the first instance the research of Talbot and Karen Atkinson, and in the second, the focus of CDA in the European Union. To the authors' credit, the use of the terms “power” and “language” in the book's title best reflects the linkages between the readings across the five chapters.

Except for two readings on multilingualism and identity that look at the medium of instruction in Hong Kong (English vs. Cantonese or Putonghua) and Spain (Catalan vs. Spanish), the examples are heavily weighted toward English data from the UK, USA, New Zealand, and Australia. Of the readings on “Language and youth,” four focus explicitly on the place of African American Vernacular English in language practices of both African American and White youths and the fifth is a fascinating extract from Les Back 1996 on parodying racism in the UK; all examine “standard [British or American] English” as the backdrop against which a variety of emerging youth identities are formed.

Once the basic organization of the book is well understood, the essays and readings make good sense. In many ways, this book would have been clearer as an edited volume with the authors providing their introductory essays as critical reviews to follow the articles in each chapter. As I read the introductory chapter, I was quite excited about the possibility of finding a volume that, at last, brought together strands from CDA and scholars such as Foucault, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Bakhtin, while at the same time used analyses of real-world language data. That excitement, however, dimmed somewhat as I continued to read the book. Although advertised as built for students – hence the “activities” section in each chapter – this is not a book that I would give to the uninitiated. Without a good background in some aspect of linguistics or discourse analysis, students simply do not have the background to understand how to undertake the analyses proposed. The authors of the volume and of the excerpted readings have all spent their time learning how to conduct research in these highly contested areas, but the authors of this book assume far too much knowledge of the student. For example, the instructions for the activity in the introductory chapter are as follows: “Look at a variety of newspaper and magazine articles and/or television news items and programmes over the period of a week and see how many of them relate to issues of language and power in one way or another.” Based on my reading of the introduction, this could possibly include every single item in every media venue, although I would be hard pressed to know how to address the relationships in any but the most general terms – that is, unless I were coming out of a sociology background where I could easily invoke an analysis based on Bourdieu, Gramsci, or Foucault, none of whom are particularly well known for close (micro-level) linguistic analysis. The glossary, heavily (and rightly) privileging Fairclough's work, does not provide sufficient training in the topic areas to allow students to conduct the activities suggested in a systematic manner. However, despite my complaints about the organization of the volume, the compiled readings are excellent.

A final caveat for people considering this book for the classroom is the abysmal proofreading in chaps. 1 through 4. (The proofs of the introduction and the final chapter appear to have been more carefully examined than the others.) One extended example is found on p. 135, where the last page of Deborah Cameron's excerpt from Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture has no capital letters. Similar problems that typically arise in scanned materials are found throughout the text, with a couple of the most interesting on p. 240, where the Yiddish definition of nosh is ‘to cat’, and on p. 202, where we find that “Accompanying this deconstruction of ‘power’ is an unpicking [sic] of what constitutes ‘resistance’.” Students, always looking for loopholes in their own writing, would have a field day with the editing in this volume.

Ultimately, this is a book that I would love to see reworked as a second edition, one that put the readings in primary position and situated the introductory statements to the chapters as review essays that highlight specific areas. To open the literature to students, this book would make more sense as an edited volume, with key issues outlined and explicated by the editors. In fact, the second edition should not be much different from the first, just well edited and organized so that one could always identify the author, the title of the excerpt, and its place in the literature. In the present form, the authors and titles of the readings are demoted to footnotes located at the bottom of the first page of each excerpt. In the running text, the readings are homogenized and rendered agentless as a numeric series under headings such as Reading 3.1, Reading 3.2, and the like. In this imaginary but hoped-for second edition, I would also rethink the prepositional phrase in the title, Language and power in the modern world, and find something less (or even more explicitly) colonial than “the modern world” when the only regions addressed, outside of Catalan, are English-speaking and/or past British colonies.