Book Review| September 01 2017 The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals. By Greg Goodale. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, pp. vii + 181. $80.00 cloth; $79.99 e-book. Mary Trachsel Mary Trachsel University of Iowa Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (3): 563–566. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.3.0563 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Trachsel; The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2017; 20 (3): 563–566. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.3.0563 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

It may have started for me that day in 1989, at the drugstore counter in Austin, Texas. I was there with my one-year-old sons and my three-year-old daughter. The twins were fussing and squirming in their stroller -one of them had an ear infection, and so we were at the drugstore picking up an antibiotic which I hoped would bring more restful nights to all of us. My daughter, her attention drawn to every colorful display near the counter where we stood, was struggling to free her hand from my grasp. One-handed, I attempted to fill out the insurance form that accompanied the prescription. The pharmacist, observing my difficulty, sympathetically offered to help me with what I had learned to consider the "literacy task" of filling out the form. She took the pen and began reading the questions to me. Name? Address? Home phone number? Work number? At this last question she stopped to survey the four of us. I was pushing the stroller back and forth in a rocking motion, attempting to calm the twins whose wails were beginning to attract the notice of strangers. The pharmacist smiled at me in a knowing and sympathetic way. "I guess that's kind of a silly question, isn't it? With all those children, surely you don't have time to work too!" But in fact I was "working." What the pharmacist didn't realize was that mothering was only, as Arlie Hochschild would say, the "second shift" of my work day.