University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

Speaking Into The Air explores the idea of communication as a problem—as something, in other words, that is worth taking time to understand. And it does so in a way that is both erudite and earnest, that looks beyond the instrumentality of communication to its spirit. "How did we get to the pass where such pathos attaches to the act of speaking to another person?" he asks, and his answer speaks to the complex interplay of strategy and mutuality that informs human interaction. Peters evocatively quotes T.S. Eliot:

"And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."