Anyone who has written so useful a book as The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) deserves an especially attentive audience from readers of this journal. But rhetoricians looking into Now Don't Try to Reason with Me … will moderate their admiration for Booth's courage in taking up the big questions with a familiar disappointment that the questions go, once more, unanswered. Things get under way briskly enough with the announcement that the author's concern is to renew the force of reason in an age given to gullibility and misdirected sincerity. But the pieces are occasional, the audiences often inexpert, and the author gyrates in a continual process of discovery, development, and restatement, so the solid definitions that would satisfy his optimistic embarkation keep slipping away….

As a beleaguered University of Chicago dean, Booth occasionally allowed his expositions of the place of reason to become exhortative and denunciatory, but throughout ten years'...