Dictionary of the Undoing

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. $15, 192 pages.

between climate crisis and political stasis, our current moment seems too large for any of our usual devices to grasp. Yet in John Freeman — writer, book champion, and editor of and — trusts the most human device of to , he peels back cliché to expose the fresh surface of meaning, reinvigorating words and the thinking we can do with them. “One of the points of this book,” he writes, “has been to navigate around the rhetorical acts of sabotage, to grab the pump levers of language and turn the lights back on.… Words are what connect us: a shared belief that the world is there and can be described and our tongues, languages, mouths make that possible.”