“In this bold and powerful book, Lakoff and Turner continue their use of metaphor to show how our minds get hold of the world. They have achieved nothing less than a postmodern Understanding Poetry, a new way of reading and teaching that makes poetry again important.”

“The authors restore metaphor to our lives by showing us that it’s never gone away. We’ve merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more ’real’ than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really ’cool.’ What we’re saying whenever we say is a theme this book illumines for anyone attentive.” 

“The intellectual adventure begun in Metaphors We Live By is here extended with the verve and resourcefulness we’d hoped for. . . . Literary metaphor has never seemed less cut off from the wider world.”

"More than Cool Reason holds itself out with deceptive modesty as a little book about metaphor. It is far more than that. George Lakoff and Mark Turner have written a compelling study of how we read poetry, embedded in an account of how our aesthetic sense functions in its intellectual, cultural, and historical contexts. Rich in insight and scholarship, clear in exposition, rigorous in argumentation, More than Cool Reason demonstrates that our processes of literary construal are rooted in metaphor and presents an elegant theory of these processes. The book offers paradigms of both micro-analysis, in a brilliant reading of metaphorical structure in William Carlos Williams’s ‘To a Solitary Disciple,’ and macroanalysis, in a wide-ranging and learned account of a dominant metaphor in all cultures and periods: the Great Chain of Being.”