This book examines the argumentation strategies employed by linguists in voicing criticism, looks for explanations for confrontation in academic discourse, and evaluates the positive and/or negative effects it has on international academic communication. The corpus under investigation consists of academic book reviews in English and German with a clearly stated negative character, as well as a series of publications in English interrelated by the fact that they discuss a common group of problems but from two fully confrontative points of view. They illustrate what has been called an "academic war".