In an elegant style and erudite manner, Danesi explores how the sense of danger has been built into human language, artistic works, and narratives, from the prehistory to the present. This book provides great insights on the cultural perception of current global crises, such as climate change and the rise of infectious diseases. * Marek Tamm, Professor of Cultural History, Tallinn University, Estonia * We live in dangerous times. People need to be warned. But how do you warn effectively? That is the essence of this book. From cave paintings to nuclear waste, from climate change to vaccines, from isolated pictorial signs that grab our attention to recurrent and abiding metaphorical frames that we use unnoticed. Enlightening, scholarly, entertaining. This is more than practical semiotics - this is semiotics for survival - the iconicity of warning signs, the representation of danger, the narratives, the myths, the interpretations and misinterpretations. Never has a book been more timely or more relevant to our everyday, interconnected world, with hidden dangers lurking around every corner. * Geoffrey Beattie, Professor of Psychology, Edge Hill University, UK * Prof. Danesi is a master of clarity in presenting a semiotic analysis of danger, as entangled with various cultural, historical, and psychological threads. This book is a model of what a semiotic analysis should look like, for both students and scholars. * Yair Neuman, Professor of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel *
