Review Essay: Somatography Debra Hawhee James Fredal, Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), ix249 pp. $50.00. Anthony Corbeill, Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xiv202 pp. $42.00. Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xi222 pp. $75.00. Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe, FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), xii141 pp. $32.95. Forgetting Speech Frederick Douglass’s account of his first ‘‘invited’’ speech in ‘‘My Bondage and My Freedom’’ includes a snippet of rhetorical criticism, auto-criticism if you will. After writing about his being sought out by the abolitionist William C. Coffin at a summer 1841 anti-slavery convention in Nantucket, Douglass recounts how he was ‘‘induced to speak out the feelings inspired by the occasion,’’ to offer ‘‘fresh recollection’’ of what he had endured as a slave. His account, remarkably, begins with what he can’t in fact recall: ‘‘My speech on this occasion is about the only one I ever made,’’ begins the auto-criticism, ‘‘of which I do not remember a single connected sentence.’’ He continues: It was with the utmost difficulty that I could stand erect, or that I could command and articulate two words without hesitation and stammering. I trembled in every limb. I am not sure that my embarrassment was not the most effective part of my speech, if speech it could be called. At any rate, this is about the only part of my performance that I now distinctly remember. But excited and convulsed as I was, the audience, though remarkably quiet before, became as much excited as myself. 1 Debra Hawhee is Associate Professor of English and Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. Correspondence to: Department of Speech Communication, University of Illinois, 702 S. Wright St. #244, Lincoln, Urbana, IL 61801-3631, USA. Email: hawhee@uiuc.edu. ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2007 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/00335630701463523 Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 93, No. 3, August 2007, pp. 365  374