Books: Rhetoric for Everybody

A READER'S GUIDE TO LITERARY TERMS (230 pp.)—Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz—Farrar, Strauss & Cudahy ($4.95).

Anyone who has suffered the pain and humiliation of having his ARETE cut from under him by a well-aimed charge of unresolved DICHOTOMY thrown in by a character loaded with gin and HUBRIS at a literary cocktail party ought to buy this splendidly written dictionary. Without being exactly a manual for the uncertain intellectual, it does live up to its blurb ("not only useful but enjoyable"). If a great many of the hundreds of terms seem Greek to...