Rating: 
Summary: Only one side of the debate
Review: CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Allan Bloom
If we frame this debate with Bloom, Neil Postman, Mark Edmundson, and Genrich Krasko all on one side, who do we have on the other? There are plenty of folks bemoaning the quality of liberal arts education in our schools. But I think another argument can be made to suggest that what our schools prepare students for is what they really need to be prepared for to survive in the world as they find it. Perhaps it is wrong to think very many people need a liberal education - a good one at least. Imagine the task of working in Wal-Mart after receiving a good liberal education? Wouldn't that be worse? "Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello!" Not 1984 but a Brave New World. Soma anyone? But there are plenty of liberal arts students that are wonderful! Don't we always have more candidates that are qualified than positions for them? Plato's suggestion that an ideal state would be just when it fit the nature of the people in it. We are not amusing ourselves to death. Virtual life is soma.
Rating: 
Summary: flawed but historically important
Review: Bloom should be credited with bringing this problem to the attention of a broader American public. Before this book, few people had a clue that college as they knew it no longer existed. Most people still don't. Yes, we can fault Bloom: he gushes over the wonders of ancient writers without giving any concrete arguments why they should be considered wonderful, and so on. But he also gives some harrowing specifics. And he turned a spotlight on a serious menace. If you want to know in what ways the situation has gotten worse, you need to read Illiberal Education, Who Stole Feminism? and other more recent books. This collection of books will also serve to refute the usual closed-minded claims that objections to the status quo come only from Conservatives. This is not about Conservativism, though Conservatives think it is. It is about education. And the situation has gotten so bad, we can now say it is about the survival of this country. Yes, it's that bad.
Rating: 
Summary: More Hype than most....
Review: This is a strange book on many counts.
1) It's hard to understand how the republican right has taken to this book. Bloom's attitude toward Christianity and the idea of economic self-interest is complete disdain. Republicans normally hold these fairly close. I must assume that most of them have not read it very carefully. It might be one of those so-called classics that everyone lugs around and small talks about but no one really reads.
2) The last hundered pages on the university, when he finally does get around to education, is totally unrelated to the rest of the book. It reads like he appended a fairly garden variety essay on the "if it feels good do it; I'm Ok-You're OK, 1960's generation, on the end of a rambling philisophical diatribe against what he sees as the the failed Enlightenment project. This is the heart of the book, is totally unrelated to what he concludes the university needs (his analysis of what is wrong with western culture in the first part of the book make his suggestions in the last 100 pages superficial), and is really not very well written. Like I said - it's a series of grand pronouncements.
3)The simplest thing he could have done to explain where he is coming from is to acknowledge Leo Strauss as the source of so much (all?) of what he says. Someone set back by the tone and the casual disdain with which this book treats so much (all of liberal democracy) and looking for more details would know where to look. This he does not do (Strauss gets one mention in the book) and it seems ridiculas if not outright dishonest.
Cheers
Craig Ryder
Rating: 
Summary: A concise rebuttal from another great american mind . . .
Review: "This is not a noble, delicate and sumblime country. This is a mess run by criminals. Performers who are doing the crude, vulgar, repulsive things Bloom doesn't enjoy are only commenting on that fact."
- Frank Zappa, 1988
Rating:
Summary: Bloom was a Great Teacher, Why Tenured Radicals Hate Him
Review: Bloom was simply a great teacher. He, in effect, told the tenured radicals how shallow and conformist they really are, and how the tenured radicals are brainwashing the unaware student and public. The heartland appreciated this book, but the entrenched neo-marxists, hysterical liberals, deconstructionists loathed Bloom and his smashingly successful book.
This book gives you real learning, makes you hungry to learn more, makes you appreciate that God gave you a soul, a mind and a heart to think with.
The new teachers of political science stink and are failing students and are nothing more than foremen in cheap diploma factories. Bloom put these quacks back where they belong forever.
Rating:
Summary: An Invitation to a Life of Wonderful Learning
Review: With Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, we are given the opportunity to enter a life of learning. Some who read this book are already living such a life, while many purchase this popular book unsuspecting of the invitation to a life of wonder that awaites them.
The Closing of the American Mind is fairly accessible at first, and grows increasingly difficult as it progresses. The history of philosophical thought can be intimidating, and is made more so by many teachers who, intentionally or not, are driven more by political than pedagogical concerns. But Bloom, who dedicates Closing "To My Students", is a discipler of minds who seduces us at first with a thorough and accessible presentation of the vague sense of superficiality and unfulfillment experienced by most readers. If at the end of Part One you feel truly known, if this is possible with a text, you then have the opportunity with the slightly uphill turn taken in Part Two to know, or, at least to know all that you don't know.
The dissatisfaction and malaise of modern life, Bloom asserts, can ultimately be traced back to movements in Western philosophy. Bloom guides readers in Part One through the damaging spiritual effects of contemporary music, books and relationships (e.g "The eroticism of our students is lame", p. 132), and then covers the same ground in Part Two, but on the level of the ideas that animate contemporary American life. Liberty and equality, Bloom writes, are the foundational assumptions of American life. These are philosophical ideas. As they have developed over centuries of Western philosophy, most intensely in Germany in the 19th century, they became increasingly problematic. Part Two of Bloom's book, entitled Nihilism, American Style, traces this development of Western thought ultimately through Germany and to America.
I am often asked for an introductory book on philosophy, and I recommend this book. Bloom argues, as one of his students wrote, that "philosophy [is] about the life and death issues that matter most" (Thomas West, Claremont Review, 6/1/00). The most commanding summary of the history of Western thought that I have come across lies in the 70-page section, entitled From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede, that begins Part Three, the final section of the book. The history of Western thought forms the critical background to many attempts to understand the world in which we live. Why? Because ideas matter. Whether you seek to make sense of events around you in the area of Western education or of Western politics, religion, art, or any other domain in which people seek fulfillment, if you are searching without the guide of philosophy, read this book first.
Rating:
Summary: I Closed My Mind to this Book
Review: Two months and 190 pages after starting this book, I simply couldn't take it anymore. I picked up the book this morning in an attempt to get to the 200 page mark, and a few minutes later realized I was staring at the page with one of those SAT-reading section stares. I had no idea what I had just read. I put the book down, deciding then I had read enough.
It honestly baffles me that this is a best seller. I have no idea how this can be. First of all, the book is written in such a dry, verbose manner that you proceed straight to bed the moment you pick it up. What's more, the author never intends to make the book palatable for the reader, focusing instead on run-on sentences and obfuscation as opposed to tried and true idea conveyance methods, such as getting to the point.
When he finally does say something you might consider a point, it's not a bad one at all. At the same time, it's hard to read this book and not wonder what the motivation is. The book meanders; having no coherent line of thought so far as I can see. It appears Bloom is more concerned with making sure you know he's read Rousseau than saying anything of value. It also appears he's gone through life thinking too much about everything. As a result, his words come across in a manner which suggests that people who haven't thought the same way must be morons, and the mire he finds himself in is better than being clear minded and unburdened by this overwhelming depression towards the human species.
At least...that's what I get out of it. I imagine it's a tremendously subjective assessment and those who disagree with me will likely say that I'm of the subset of the American mind he is writing about. In one sentence Bloom lauds this attitude of man, the next he bashes it. Consistency isn't of paramount importance as he meanders through this diatribe of confusion. What you read in the previous paragraph may or may not have anything to do with this one. It appears to me this book was written over the course of a very long and non-continuous time.
Again, I quit after 190 pages. I'm not sure why I gave it that many, because this turned out to be a waste of time for me. There are pertinent thoughts in this book, to be sure. But the way he says them and the fact that he says 100 inane things for every point made is what makes this book weak. Coming to the decision that I wasn't going to read any more of it was a happy one. I'm glad to be done with it.
Move on, nothing much to see here.
Rating:
Summary: Best Conservative Book I've Read
Review: Forget Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, this guy is a real intellectual. Bloom is very direct in his criticism of the intellectual crisis in America, and it's getting worse since he wrote this book, with MTV, porn, video games..it's the dumming down of America right now and our forefathers would be shocked I think. He was right in so many areas, and his words are prophetic. If the emphasis on pleasure beats out the emphasis on meaning, America will continue to have a very rocky road! Bloom's observations on what is really going on in our campus's is startling and sometimes depressing. It was stunning to me that many college students are turning away from classical literature. We need more people like Allan Bloom, to "tell it like it is." Jeffrey McAndrew
author of "Our Brown-Eyed Boy" and political moderate
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