the book is wonderful reading
Haoran Mao, Discourse Studies
By examining the grammatical and rhetorical structure of such apologies, Battistella shows that our anxieties and confusions about confession are rooted in a deeper ambiguity that defines the genre of apology more broadly: the tension between the culpable self and the apologetic self.
Christian Century ... Read more
Edwin Battistella's readable and incisive Sorry About That explains why some apologies succeed, or at least avoid exacerbating the original offense, but most of them fail.
Wall St. Journal
Sorry About That is a bracing catalogue of human folly that stuck with me after I'd finished reading it. Battistella provides a panoramic view of shameful episodes and the subsequent apologies, confessions, and denials whose language he keenly dissects, in order to show all the ways that we have to genuinely apologize
and to wiggle free. Observers of public language will love the book. (So too, alas, will serial offenders.)
Conditional apologies, vague apologies, apologies not accepted: Why is it so hard to say we're sorry and be done with it? With a clear eye and prose that never drags, Ed Battistella brilliantly illuminates the hidden dynamics of public apologies from the Oprah Winfrey Show to Mel Gibson's downfall and from Joe Biden's doubletalk to Woodrow Wilson's shoelace-chewing mea culpa. You won't be sorry you read this book.
David Skinner, author of The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
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