Booth and Elbow engage in a dialogue about what has become even more important in recent years, namely how we come to believe what we believe and convince others to believe with us. Booth speculates that one needs to commit oneself to combating both dogmatism and skepticism by embracing the rhetoric of assent, and offers rules to help us “learn how to listen”; Elbow agrees with Booth on a number of points but argues for the special value of dissent, perhaps even “unreasonable” dissent, before going on to offer specific classroom practices that can advance their common goal of critical thinking.

States that a number of college literature and composition teachers have shown that they care intensely about ethical issues, although they express themselves in the language of postmodernism rather than that of traditional ethics. Claims the traditional ethical goal of building “character” can be harmonized with the postmodern effort to build “selves”--persons with a “useful” ethical center.

Since 1995, students, researchers, and professionals have turned to The Craft of Research for clear and helpful guidance on how to conduct research and report it effectively. Now, master teachers Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams have completely revised and updated their classic handbook. The new edition will continue to help thousands of students and writers plan, carry out, and report on research to produce effective term papers, dissertations, articles, or books -- in any field, at any level.

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I change my What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new philosophy of reasons Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that you cannot reason about and that job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted, and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a befouled rhetorical climate in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes defenders of reason becoming confined to ever narrower notions of logical or experimental proof and defenders of values becoming more and more irresponsible in trying to defend the heart, the gut, or the gonads. Booth traces the consequences of modernist assumptions through a wide range of inquiry and action: in politics, art, music, literature, and in personal efforts to find identity or a self. In casting doubt on doubt, the author finds that the dogmas are being questioned in almost every modern discipline. Suggesting that they be replaced with a rhetoric of systematic assent, Booth discovers a vast, neglected reservoir of good reasons many of them known to classical students of rhetoric, some still to be explored. These good reasons are here restored to intellectual respectability, suggesting the possibility of widespread new inquiry, in all fields, into the question, When should I change my mind?

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L. J. Morrissey, William M. Jones, Charles A. Pennel, R. E. K., Robert D. Stevick, Tom Hatton, George Doskow, Richard Henze, Ralph M. Wardle, Edward P. J. Corbett, Robert L. Hough, Frederick M. Link, John Unterecker, Frank W. Bliss, Donna Gerstenberger, Ted E. Boyle, Merlene A. Ogden, Joseph Satin, Dale B. J. Randall, Harold R. Hungerford, Wayne C. Booth, Gerald L. Gullickson, Charles Kaplan, John H. Matthews, Book Reviews, College English, Vol. 27, No. 7 (Apr., 1966), pp. 577-585

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