Rating: 
Summary: Cranky author with a closed mind
Review: Bloom thinks everybody should get a classical education and be able to quote Greek mythology and spout Latin phrases...he denounces pop music, contemporary literature, and just about anything and everything newer generations like. However, his diatribe (and that's what it is) ignores the hard economic fact of life that liberal arts majors have a tough time building a good career without applicable course work. How many employers need or want an employee who knows Latin but can't operate a spreadsheet program? This is a book that's past its prime, written by a cranky author with a closed mind.
Rating:
Summary: Dry & mindless prose
Review: Sorry, I don't get the attraction. On & on, an endless editorial on the American cultural condition, in dry & occasionally mindless prose. Like its contemporary, Cultural Literacy, Bloom's The Closing of... is critical tepidity to make smug ignoramuses feel bright. In other words, it's the best we have. When Bloom tackles pop music, you can feel not only waves of ignorance about his topic but an undercurrent of indifference as well. I finally read this because I thought it might be part of my cultural education. But it wasn't; however, it's legacy remains firm: newspaper commentary & those Sunday morning public affairs programs are packed with the recycled themes of curmudgeonly Mr. Bloom & presented in the same self-absorbed fashion.
Rating: 
Summary: Most Profound
Review: I have read hundreds of books and my interests cover all the major categories of knowledge. This book is the most profound of all. Bloom traces many schools of thought to the roots and exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of American education. The university, once integrated and held together by philosophy is now a disjointed, fragmented, political machine that cannot give a student the liberal education that was once available. Many institutions are a mockery of learning. Most of the changes happened in the 1960's when professors capitulated to so-called civil rights insurgents with demands for qualifications based on whether or not one was black. Some professors were brave, but most eventually gave in to the immoral pressure. There went the universities. Some other ideas encouraging the disentigration he traces to some of the German philosophers who attacked enlightenment thinking. He also traces the roots of charismatic leadership and shows how this is foreign to our constitutional traditions. This book requires patient reading and must be read several times for understanding. Even then, the book can be reread and something new will be learned. Read it with a notepad and take notes. Read the book a second time with notes in hand and take more notes. Trust me - the book is that profound. Do not believe some of the silly reviews that only read the book once and did not get the meaning. One has to be a scholar in search of knowledge to really understand the book. If one is ambitious, it is well worth the effort. I purchased the book back in 1996 and I still go back to it and reread sections of it with pen and notepad in hand.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful achievement
Review: I would highly recommend "Closing" to anyone who would be interested in taking a grand tour of Western intellectual thought. Professor Bloom expresses many important insights and observations in this book, not the least of which is the fact that many American college and university students today are not familiar with the ideas of classical Western thinkers such as Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. However, there is a profound irony in the fact that this book is lauded by many conservatives. In reality, many of the same "social conservatives" who decry the ignorance of today's student body in the Western classics are often the same "economic conservatives" who implicitly belittle a classical/liberal arts education by placing so much emphasis upon financial aspirations that students tend to shy away from a classical curriculum in favor of more "practical", careerist curricula. Students whose main goal in life is to make a buck are not going to be attracted to "irrelevant" courses in philosophy, history, classical literature, etc. As a result, I think it is fair to say that the current crisis in American education stems both from attacks by the Left (as Bloom points out in his book), and the economic Right.
Rating: 
Summary: On the Closing of the University Mind
Review: This book is a great book. If you have ever wonder why we believe what we do, or why some wrong views are so common, this will be a great soul opener. Mr. Bloom discusses the implication of ideas from Socrates to Hegel, all the way to Nietzsche. He moves like an anthropological philosopher plucking ideas (or lack of them) and their implication to America. The book goes meticulously warning us, and ultimately teaching us, of the actual condition of Americas thinkers and what could happen at the end of this trail. This text will prepare the table for a deeper search in the classics that will counter attack the closing of the University Mind, that is really Bloom ultimate goal with this exercise.
Rating:
Summary: Vandals at the Gates
Review: This is the most extraordinary work of the mind of my experience. It exceeds anything by Plato, by Aristotle, by Aquinas, by Lock or Hobbes, by Rousseau or Kant, by Hegel or Nietzsche or Freud or any of the scores of scholarly reflections I've read in a lifetime of thinking about questions that have occupied serious thinkers since the beginning: What is the good, and why? What is important, and what not? Are there universal truths, and can we know them? How? Can we trust our senses? our feelings? How can I attain "the good life"? This, then, is a book of the ideas that have shaped the West ("those nations influenced by Greek philosophy"). Bloom exceeds all the rest because he incorporates them in this remarkable review of Western thought. He revisits the Greeks, the Romantics, the Enlightenment thinkers and those who followed, on down to modernity. Which is to say, this book is must reading for anyone who wants to know two things: Where did we come from - what IS the best that has been thought and said in the West? - and where are we now? It is very nearly a college education all by itself. If you came of age during the 1960s, you read this book remembering the incidents, in the Ivy League and elsewhere, when rebellion swept campuses nationwide and the academy sold out wholesale to intimidation by scruffy, ignorant students. Bloom shows the roots of this phenomenon in the sellout of the German academy in the Thirties. American universities, in thought and deed, are following the German pattern virtually without deviation and oblivious to the fact that they are doing it. The sellout of scholarly principle didn't end in the Sixties; it simply started then and has been in progress ever since. University students today almost routinely rob the entire issue of a student newspaper, to "protest" something they don't like while university administrators cringe. And what happens in the academy always finds its way to the streets. Hence the shabby Clinton presidency, which showed an America cut off from its intellectual roots, without principle and dedicated solely to self. Our very capacity to think has been impaired. In one fell swoop, it seemed, we went from careful attention to detail to "all men are potential rapists," "white people are all racists," "the patriarchy" - sweeping generalizations based on faulty logic. Gone is the capacity for nuanced thinking. Scholarship traditionally involved the lone man in a library, pondering the deep questions. Today's mode is to go for the knockout punch in front of an audience. Slick glibness, the cutting remark or putdown (or shoutdown), takes priority over precision and accuracy. Our debt to the Greeks, the Enlightenment and the Romantics I was already versed in. What I didn't appreciate was the profound impact of Max Weber on American thought, or the Left's bastardization of Nietzsche in fusing him with Marx. The scholastic vandals have distorted these world-class thinkers beyond recognition, in many cases actually reversing what they said and wrote. Deprived of their academic birthright, today's graduates of "the best" schools stand in relation to their forebears as "the wise guy to the wise man," know-nothings convinced of their superiority. The betrayal of the Western intellectual tradition has three causes: laziness, cowardice and selfishness on the part of the professoriate. The only way to beat it is with superior minds proving their mettle on the battleground of ideas. Bloom doesn't say this; Camille Paglia does, and she's right. It's time to clean house.
Rating:
Summary: A Lover of Wisdom....
Review: "To educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves! And for these I write." -Friedrich Nietzsche Allan Bloom tries to do exactly that--educate the educators, or, for that matter, anyone who is willing question their assumptions and values. He writes with a very lively and elegant style and with enormous insight into the American mentality. Interestingly, Allan Bloom has few scholarly pretentions--it is clear from the outset that he does not intend to assume any kind of balance in his writing. He is simply writing down what he thinks, in a completely unapologietic form. Whatever your intellectual background, this book will make you think...alot.
Rating:
Summary: Elitist nonsense.
Review: It is disturbing that many people in the academic community have embraced the positions advocated by this book. Bloom's Eurocenrtic elitism is absurdly out of touch with today's America. He rejected almost everything less than three centuries old, which pretty much eliminates the entirity of American accomplishments. Worse yet, he lacked any understanding of the culture that surrounded him. Even basic contemporary concepts like freedom of speech and freedom of the press seem to have eluded him. Nobody disagrees that today's scholars should read the great thinkers of the past. But students living in today's real world have a greater need to develop an understanding and appreciation for today's culture. For better perspectives, I suggest reading "Culture's Sleeping Beauty" by Michael Bugeja, "Legacy of Wisdom" by John Merrill and any of Arthur Asa Berger's books about interpreting popular culture.
Rating:
Summary: Way Cool Retro
Review: Professor Bloom has written a disturbing book by compressing much of the Western canon into a running conversation--thereby producing a gem to contemplate, in spite of its flaws and occasional density. Those of us who missed many courses in the humanities thank Bloom formaking some rather esoteric materials accessible, comprehensible,and debatable. His causal argument is, however flawed: a constant can never explain a variable. "Human nature"(one evolutionary possibility having its likely origin in a long vanished primordial fish), conveys apermanence for Bloom that is imaginary. I'm not sure that truth (of any kind) inheres in confusing an origin state (in the mind of Socrates or anyone else) with its current manifestation. Ideation is both dynamic and interactive. Moreover, life conditions also change. Self is no longer limited to individual musings on the eternal, or to revelations inspired by the ancients. Socrates does not have the final word, nor does "the modern" result from the rantings of Nietzsche or Heidegger, absent a social context. A living philosophy, however, does require action: to leave the cave. For professors,this means due diligence, lest their deans and presidents come to think like businessmen. How do we encourgae critical thought? Bloom's answer can be devastating for democracy: rarely, if at all. But this has little to do with the validity or revealed ancient wisdom and is causedby the fact that the American genius at rapidly changing the physical wprld attracts a lot of attention, yet the increasing doses of that alluring opiate called "socialization" remains unexamined. When "dangerous knowledge", i.e., thinking unlike the herd, is increasingly absent from centers of higher learning, however, the young are cheated. More professors like Bloom should be minding the store. Bloom's essentialism (his quest for eternal verities; his search for "primary causes"; his asserting the constancy of "human nature" is archaic. That a free people might lose its critical voice (by slowly and systematically eliminating it from the higher education curriculum, is a serious threat. The jackboot (left or right style) of total control, after all, always begins with small, almost imperceptible steps, before its stride becomes ominous. Faculties must be responsible in this regard. When, however, the "useless" parts of an academic program are discarded, they are, contrary to Bloom, not replaced with "nothing" but with alternatives which further dumb-down the learning experience. There is nothing new in this, unless and until their professors join the parade,since they,afterall, are socially charged with knowing better. If they succumb, it will effectively preclude ideas of alternate futures from ever being articulated by the young as such notions cannot endure amid the din of "the popular" during students' formative years.Doctrine is not required here,however, as indifference, curricula paring, and careerism will do the job just fine--and with much less effort. When an academic discipline falls; is discarded; is popularly deemed irrelevant (or dies of neglect), a rose withers. When there is no critical check on the compounding implications of rapid social change, ethnocentrism, and technological innovation, however, the remaining garden may survive, but the enslavement--always subtle at first--of the gardener becomes a very real possibility.
Rating: 
Summary: The closing of Allan Bloom's mind
Review: This is not just a bad book. It is a sick one. Bloom's obsessions are clear on almost every page: sex and rock music. Although clothed in a pretentious philosophical language, his objections betray what's really on his mind: he feels left out. The sexual revolution of the Sixties passed him by, and like the child whose playmates decide he's not good enough to get into the game, he retaliates by labelling everything about his opponents evil. The poet Philip Larkin had Bloom's number when he wrote in his poem, Annus Mirabilis: Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/ (Which was rather late for me)-Between the end of the _Chatterley_ ban/And the Beatles' first LP. Like many neo-conservatives, Bloom doesn't really understand the principle of free speech. He says it "has given way to freedom of expression, in which the obscene gesture enjoys the same protected status as demonstrative discourse." In other words, freedom of speech should only apply to those that Bloom approves of. (He also doesn't apparently know that the Canadian constitution guarantees "freedom of expression", precisely to avoid arbitrary Bloom-style distinctions.) Like many humanists, he is deeply distrustful of science. And so he continues to push thinkers like Plato as essential to understanding the world, displaying no comprehension of the intellectual revolution brought by, for example, Charles Darwin. Is it still fruitful to read the Greeks? Certainly. But to pretend that we have learned nothing in 2000 years, that the insights of science play no part in an informed understanding of the world, is to (again) play the part of the small child who insists, contrary to all evidence, that there is really is a Santa Claus. Ultimately, this books tells us not about the mind of Americans, but rather the small, sanctimonious, and quite closed mind of one university professor named Allan Bloom.
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