* How do generals - and business strategists - outwit their opponents? * Where do designers and artists get their inspirations from? * How can all of us 'pump up the originality' and steer our thinking off the standard, well-worn tracks? Everyone, as the French philosopher Rene Descartes pointed out long ago, thinks. That's the easy bit. The harder part, and what this book is really about, is how to make your thinking original and effective. And here the problem is that too often we don't really engage the gears of our brain, don't really look at issues in an original or active way, we just respond. Like computers, inputs are processed according to established rules and outputs are thus largely predetermined. Yet that's not what makes us human and that's not where the big prizes in life are to be found. In the third millennium, we need to think a bit more - not less! And so the focus in this book is on practical suggestions about ways to think better... on thinking strategies that each have their own style, applications and benefits.

Occupying Memory investigates the forces of trauma and mourning as deeply rhetorical in order to account for their capacity to seize one's life. Rather than viewing memory as granting direct access to the past and being readily accessible or pliant to human will, Trevor Hoag exposes how the past is a rhetorical production and that trauma and mourning shatter delusions of sovereignty. By granting memory the posthuman power to persuade without an accompanying rhetorician, and contending the past cannot become a reality without being written, this book highlights rhetoric's indispensability while transforming its relationship to memorialization, trauma, narrative, death, mourning, haunting, and survival. Analyzing and deploying the rhetorical trope of occupatio, Occupying Memory inhabits the conceptual place of memory by reinscribing it in ways that challenge hegemonic power while holding open that same space to keep memory "in question" and receptive to alternative futures to come. Hoag likewise demonstrates how one might occupy memory through insights gleaned from analyzing artifacts, media, events, and tropes from the Occupy Movement, a contemporary national and international movement for socioeconomic justice.