Marjorie Garber is primarily a Shakespeare scholar, but she also takes on many other subjects and does them well. Loaded Words moves easily from "high" to "low" culture, drawing from a variety of sources. "Mad Lib," for example, draws upon Shakespeare (of course), but also Hitchcock (espionage), The Manchurian Candidate, Mad magazine and Mad Men (advertising) to show how culturally loaded a word like "mad" or "madness" is. Garber almost gushes with excitement over the famous Cranach edition of Hamlet, the "finest in the world," as she explores the historical impact of Shakespeare and his play, while "Our Genius Problem" chastises us all for the sloppy way we use the word "genius"--as she advises, "it may be time to go cold turkey for a while."
Three essays in the collection examine a subject dear to Garber's heart, the importance of the humanities; another on Shakespeare shows us how we can read in "slow motion." And conservative readers may not like her piece in praise of radicals and radical education--loaded words today indeed. You don't need to be a literary scholar to enjoy these provocative essays, as Garber demonstrates that "all words are loaded, and that they are, inescapably, both overbrimming and biased, or weighted." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher