The University Bookman

Bob Dylan took Latin. Patrick J. Burns reviews Why Bob Dylan Matters, an insightful reflection on Dylan’s investment and, ultimately, his participation, in the Western literary tradition by Richard Thomas.

One way of defining “rationalism” (when the term is understood as a flaw rather than a virtue) is that it is the attempt to replace experience by technique. In his important new book, historian Jerry Muller takes on a particular species of rationalism: our modern fixation on replacing expert judgment with might be described as “the dictatorship of the quantifiable.”

Imaginative Conservatism will be of primary interest to fans of Russell Kirk and those interested in the history of twentieth-century conservative thought. Kirk was one of the foremost voices of American conservatism and this look into his personal correspondence is invaluable to understand the man and the movement.

In The Philanthropic Revolution, Jeremy Beer succeeds in his two-pronged effort to delineate charity from philanthropy, both in their actual practice and in their distinct origins, and to expose the long-ignored skeletons of philanthropy’s deep, historical closets.

In the lobby of the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, D.C. stands a three-and-a-half-story tower of Lincoln books. It contains fewer than half of the fifteen thousand books—and counting—published about the sixteenth president.