I get pinged fairly regularly for book recommendations from people who get intrigued by my Rhetoric degree -- places they can read up, get the basics, maybe even go further than basics. So here is my baseline rhetoric bibliography, filled with both some solid introductory/overviewing texts, and then some super-advanced theory stuff. All breadcrumbs along the pathway to rhetorician land.
* Basic/Pragmatic Applications of Rhetoric
() Dan French (my book) -- “The 21 Coliseums of Persuasion”
() Karlyn Kohrs-Campbell -- multiple books on traditional rhetoric
() Keith & Lundberg, “The Essential Guide to Rhetoric”
() Robert Cialdini -- “Influence: Science and Practice“
* Big Theory Rhetoric
() Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric’s favorite modern thinker -- his full book collection is great (esp Permanence & Change, Attitudes Toward History, and A Rhetoric of Motives).
() Aristotle “The Rhetoric” -- Rhetoric’s favorite ancient thinker
() Berger and Luckmann, “The Social Construction of Reality”
() Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation” (great media theory)
() Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Dialogic Imagination” (great semantic theory)
() Fredric Jameson, “The Prison-House of Language.” Also, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”
() Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” (essay on the slippery nature of language)