With the publication of (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks, Xin Liu Gale and Fredric G. Gale provide the first book-length study of the important and troubling place that textbooks have occupied in the development of composition studies. The editors hope that their collection will open a more systematic and sustained inquiry into the historical, pedagogical, and economic significance of textbooks. Toward this end, the contributors examine a range of textbooks, including rhetorics, argumentation textbooks, cross-cultural anthologies, writing handbooks, and technical writing textbooks. As their essays demonstrate, textbooks are interesting objects of study because of the ambivalent location they occupy in the discipline. At the same time that textbooks are often touted as indices to composition's formation and development, they are "seldom considered worthy scholarship," as the Gales explain in their introduction to this volume. While textbooks are intended for use in writing classrooms, the contributors demonstrate that textbooks rarely reflect current views of writing as a process of discovery and invention.

Such ambivalence about textbooks is reproduced in (Re)Visioning, where the contributors piece together a daunting critique of textbooks and their complicity with dominant value systems, capitalist economic policies, and an outmoded conception of writing as largely instrumental and rule-governed. They view textbooks not as "worthy scholarship" but as market-driven, applied knowledge inconsistent with current theoretical advances in composition studies. Consequently, (Re)Visioning tends to create a monolithic view of textbooks as instruments of dominant culture and neglects to examine fully the extent to which teachers strategically use textbooks instead of being used by them. Still, (Re)Visioning is at its best when addressing the material conditions of textbook publishing, when questioning the values transmitted through textbooks, and when calling attention to the way that descriptions of the writing process fail to account for how cultural differences shape writing practices. Based on these strengths, I recommend this book to all teachers and scholars interested in the material and political conditions of knowledge production in composition studies.

Offering a clear sense of the necessary scope for this study, (Re)Visioning examines the culture of textbooks from both inside the classroom and inside the publishing business. The collection begins with David Bleich's provocative, "In Case of Fire, Throw In (What to Do with Textbooks Once You Switch to Sourcebooks)." Bleich contends that textbooks are written in a style of "direct instruction" that is characterized by the use of "imperative and declarative voices almost exclusively as instruments of informing students about writing different texts." His problem with direct instruction is that it promotes "authoritarian values through writing instruction." Bleich suggests that writing teachers use "sourcebooks" that do not dictate "one way" to write but instead describe alternative "language types, kinds, uses, registers, and forms." His criticism of textbooks is reinforced and expanded in Kurt Spellmeyer's "The Great Way: Reading and Writing in Freedom." Spellmeyer argues that textbooks play an unacknowledged social role not only by reinforcing "an impression of total predictability in the conduct of everyday life" but also by suppressing questioning; they thus have a deadening effect on students' desire to read and write. In Spellmeyer's view, textbooks seem to be a symptom of a larger problem in academia. Education, he argues, is no longer the central task of universities; instead, their task is to produce specialized knowledge. He laments the fact that "specialists" (read: theorists) "will try to show that the meaning of everything we read—the meaning, for example, of Marquez's flying pigs—is determined by a `semiotic system' that predetermines our responses." Spellmeyer yearns for an earlier time when reading was personally illuminating, when asking questions was part of an art of discovery, and when interpreting a text was a valid means by which we came to understand the world.

As compelling as their arguments may be to some readers, both Bleich and Spellmeyer make some questionable assumptions about the teaching of writing. Bleich, for example, asserts that there "has been no more attention to writing pedagogy for graduate students in English than for graduate students in psychology." Later he claims, "Most textbooks, especially when used by inexperienced teachers, reinforce socially coercive constraints." In his first assertion, Bleich generalizes about the absence of teacher training in English graduate programs without providing any evidence to substantiate a genuine absence. Judging by the extremely vocal conversation among writing program administrators about teacher-training, I must say that his assertion paints pedagogical training with too broad a brush. In his second assertion, Bleich underestimates teacher-agency while overestimating the extent to which any teacher, experienced or not, closely follows the instructions of a textbook. In the course of teaching at three different institutions, I have seen both new and experienced teachers in search of materials to supplement textbook offerings. I have also seen communities of teachers working together to improve on, and differentiate their pedagogies from, textbook approaches. In short, I don't recognize Bleich's teacher who blindly accepts and administers textbook knowledge to students.

Like Bleich, Spellmeyer fails to make a distinction between textbooks and how teachers use them. He observes that within "the worldless pages of a textbook, the most astonishing insights get degraded into facts—into possible answers on a possible exam. And the `questioning' that students undertake in this case can assume a distinctly lifeless character—since the answers already lie waiting for them, buried in the special pages of the teacher's edition." This conflation between teachers and the "teacher's edition" fails to acknowledge that teachers creatively work with, and improvise from, required textbooks. Textbooks, after all, are used within specific contexts and are framed by teachers who, more often than not, do not teach strictly "by the book." A survey of how experienced and inexperienced writing teachers actually use textbooks in their classrooms would have contributed a valuable and enlightening dimension to (Re)Visioning.

A more nuanced view of composition textbooks does appear in the pages of (Re)Visioning. Yameng Liu, for example, focuses on specific cross-cultural readers in order to show how an "anti-essentialist, anti-objectivist stance is seldom maintained consistently in composition textbooks." He argues that it is unrealistic for such texts "to assume that exposure to a couple of articulated views about or from a culture would enable the students to transcend their `misconceptions' and to walk away from the class with a `truthful' representation of that culture." Michael Kleine's essay, like Liu's, unveils the essentializing work of rhetoric textbooks. He proposes that the majority of such texts posit rhetoric as a transcendent discourse. Kleine advances an approach to teaching rhetoric that emphasizes contrasting rhetorical perspectives so that students might come to understand that each is value-laden and interested instead of authoritative.

In a similar vein, Lizbeth Bryant contends that argument texts present a "monologic and monolithic view of argumentation." She explains how cultural differences shape conceptions of argumentation. For example, Bryant draws on the work of Fan Shen, a Chinese writer who details his struggle to produce a linear, American argument—a style of writing antithetical to a Chinese concept of argument as writing that unfolds like the peeling of an onion. Bryant fails to persuade this reader, however, when she deploys outdated feminist research to show that gender differences translate into different argumentation styles. While she clearly states that she is not essentializing female writing by claiming it is narrative-driven and non-confrontational, she also includes passages such as the following: "What is it that `they,' textbook producers, don't understand? That research shows patterns in the discourse practices of females that are antithetical to the traditional models of discourse in most textbooks." Because she does not adequately acknowledge contemporary feminist criticism of this logic, I found myself questioning Bryant's investment in a view of argumentation that is not "monologic and monolithic."

Also interested in the political dimension of pedagogical instruction, Joseph Janangelo explores ways in which writing handbooks function to satisfy and ultimately pacify administrators and others who have an explicit interest in the certification of literacy. He explains, "I attribute these texts' reductive, parodic depictions of student writing to the dual project of containment and contentment that writing programs feel compelled to engage in in order to achieve legitimation as an intellectually credible, results-oriented field of inquiry." Janangelo employs the term containment to suggest that "the writing program uses the handbook as a stabilizing and controlling influence on students." The contentment function, according to Janangelo, operates through the handbook's reassuring promise to administrators, colleagues, and parents that writing can be taught and learned effortlessly and quickly. Handbooks provide a self-legitimating narrative for writing programs which, Janangelo claims, ultimately masks the more complicated reality of writing as a recursive process that is not easily learned by every student.

Xin Liu Gale's study of The St. Martin's Guide to Writing will be of interest to many teachers and scholars because so many of us have used this textbook in our writing classes. She shows that the short, unrelated, decontextualized writing assignments, and the Guide's prescriptions for how to write, create a "full toolbox" that is completely at odds with our disciplinary knowledge. This knowledge teaches that writing is not "a rule-abiding, direction-following, authority-obeying classroom exercise; it is a learning, questioning, inquiring, communicating, growing, meaning-making, socializing, thinking, and symbolizing process." What I like most about this essay is its focus on the pedagogical function of one particular, and nearly canonical, writing textbook. Rather than making broad, unsupported claims about the authoritarian values transmitted by all textbooks, Gale develops a contextualized study of a widely used writing textbook—a textbook that, given its influence and popularity, finally reveals why and how textbook production and selection are so problematic.

The strongest and, to my mind, most valuable section of the book is the final one: "Material and Political Conditions of Publishing Textbooks." This section offers important contributions to understanding the materiality of teaching composition, an understanding that, in my view, begs for further development. In "Of Handbooks and Handbags: Composition Textbook Publishing after the Deal Decade," Peter Mortensen examines the discourse of corporate publishing. More specifically, he focuses on the "deal decade of the 1980s" and delineates the "shift from managerial (that is, editorial) to shareholder control" in publishing corporations. Mortensen observes that between 1984 and 1989 business developments rendered unstable "the publishing of both textbooks and trade titles, as mega-mergers and hostile takeovers enabled investors to create huge media conglomerates." For example, he reports that during this period Allyn & Bacon became a property of Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures, King's Island theme parks, Blockbuster Video, and Simon & Schuster publishing. As a result, a new instrument of owner control emerged: shareholder activism. "The principle here," he writes, "is that shareholders, and not company management, should direct business decisions toward increased profitability, usually calculated only in the short term." He goes on to propose that teachers view students as investors and thereby use textbook selection as a way to get the attention of corporate management. Similarly, James Zebroski suggests that teachers use textbooks in ways that conflict with their stated intentions. "A text not only represents; it functions," Zebroski insists. He examines textbook advertisements in an attempt to add a "material dimension to all of this otherwise too epistemological analysis." Both Mortensen and Zebroski implicitly urge teachers and students to examine and question the material conditions that shape textbook production.

This collection inspires me to question the taken-for-granted status of textbooks as necessary ingredients in writing courses. I especially appreciate the implicit focus on the disciplining effect that textbooks have in composition studies, a focus that suggests how textbooks have both limited and made possible certain ways of seeing writing and teaching. This focus, which might have been usefully developed through an examination of students' perspectives on textbooks, must include at least two key questions: Do students experience textbooks as oppressive, monologic, and rule-governed? What is the view of writing impressed on them through years of schooling and years of reading textbooks? These questions should inform future studies of writing textbooks. Until then, (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks offers the most sustained and substantial study of textbook production to date. Among other things, this book encourages compositionists to question that which is completely taken for granted, that which passes as "normal" in writing classrooms: the place and function of the textbook in our very concept of first-year writing.