Rating: 
Summary: A worthy read.
Review: Bloom's book is brilliant and insightfull - a detailed analyses of the attitude held by the Canadian gentleman who threw his copy away before finishing it.
Rating: 
Summary: a good idea, poor execution
Review: Mr. Bloom's book is a good idea. Certainly, Nihilism and the lack of respect for tradition, classical education are a problem in our society. I do agree with Mr. Bloom that a university education should be rooted in reading the classics of literature and science. However, his argument was filled with what one reviewer called "cheap shots" and his inability to see anything good or positive in popular culture undermined his argument against much of what is going on in popular culture. This book was a disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece on philosophy and education in our times.
Review: Bloom begins with the problem of liberal education at the end of the 20th century - in a world where students are taught from childhood that "values" are relative and that tolerance is the first virtue, too many students arrive at college without knowing what it means to really believe in anything. They think they are open-minded but their minds are closed to the one thing that really matters: the possibility of absolute truth, of absolute right and wrong. In explaining where we are and how we got here, Bloom presents a devastating critique of modern American education and its students, an intellectual history of the United States and its unique foundation in Enlightenment philosophy, and an assesment of the project of liberal education.Far from being just another critic of the latest postmodern fad or the ongoing excesses of academic relativism, Bloom has his eye on the ages - his subject is our place in history and our relationship to the canon of philosophy handed down to us over centuries. This book isn't about the last few decades of academic decline, it's about the last few centuries of philosophical upheaval and uncertainty. Bloom's pessimism about the future prospects of liberal education (and Enlightenment liberalism generally) isn't entirely warranted, but then that's partially because so many of Bloom's readers have taken his warnings seriously and labored to reverse the academic trends he identified so clearly. If the light at the end of the tunnel is now dimly visible, in large part we have Bloom to thank for it.
Rating:
Summary: Half brilliant, half utterly fallacious
Review: Bloom's book vibrates with passion and stoops into the very nihilism he tries to attack. "The Germanization of the University?" Excuse me, but as a disciple of Leo Strauss (who was German) his tirade looks to this reader a tad disingenuous. Where he really shines is critiquing the spiritual deadness of the learning process. Here again, however, he borrows heavily from a critique of modernity not indigenously American, and which owes much to Heidegger, whom Bloom (rightly) despises. For all its author's impressive erudition one gets the feeling that the line of argumentation, of the whole, is shaggy and crowd-pleasing, and often narcissistically derived more from the author's own grudges than from an attempt to engage real issues. Read it with a grain of salt; better yet, read Philip Rieff's Fellow Teachers instead. There is a book which understands its argumentative limits and engages the imagination, without resorting to the cheap shots that, at bottom, too often characterize Closing.
Rating:
Summary: A treatise of truth
Review: I'm a student of the very University Dr. Bloom was both an Alumna and professor. His is a book that says so precisely and accurately what hours and weeks of very expensive, small discussion classes often leave unrealized. Contrary to responses suggesting otherwise, Professor Bloom masterfully portrays the multitude of students entering and leaving the elite universities and insightfully details the roots of our bad thought. I have most intimatly realized just how comprehensive is Dr Bloom's command of political philosophy -- upon completing a course focusing soley on Rousseau's 'Social Contract', I have re-read those chapters of "Closing," touching upon Rousseau to find the discussion so comprehensive as to provide direct answers to the question, 'why is what this guy says noteworthy.' I feel a tremendous debt to Professor Bloom. He has brought meaning to my learning.
Rating:
Summary: A wake-up call for academia
Review: Mr. Bloom's book is absolutely amazing! His analysis of the current situation in higher education is insightful and scholarly. Bloom successfully proves that American and, in particular, the American university have been negatively influenced by Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Freud, and many other modern philosophers.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is THE non-fiction book for me. It is the most complete discussion on the wholeness of man, and why American students are "flat-souled." Some items are a bit dated, but the over-all thesis holds up suprisingly well. This is a book that rarely gets a three star rating. You will either love it, or hate it. Those who dislike it, usually write ridiculously long self-serving essays on how "broad-minded" they are, while making sophmoric dismissals as to it's content. Well, any book that irritates so many a decade after it's first printing, must be doing something right. Three cheers for Allan Bloom!!
Rating:
Summary: I threw my copy away halfway through
Review: As far as I can tell, the late Mr. Bloom was upset that as a professor, he no longer got automatic respect. And he went on about that at some length. I was never convinced that he merited any respect. I thought this book was a waste of his time and my money. Henry Troup
Rating:
Summary: I wish my professors had souls
Review: Allan Bloom has a soul, which sets him apart from most of the posers who teach in our universities and regularly commend each other for their "compassion" and "open-mindedness". I went into university with a generally good disposition towards school and learning---I came out disillusioned with professors who have a lot of surface compassion but nothing to show underneath (in strong intellect or hearts), and believe me I tried to find it because I wanted to find it. I wanted to believe after my baptism into the college "culture" that they had something more to tell me than "everything's relative, even though we're sure that tradition, Christianity, and men are evil." Well, they dressed their lectures up with vague PC-watchwords and complex (didactic) explanations, but it all boiled down to fatally flawed philosophies, what Bloom illuminates in this book. I only wish I'd read it BEFORE I went to university, I might have laughed my way through classes rather than search for a beating heart beneath the veneer of academia. I thank God (oops!) that I had a few truly open-minded professors who encouraged or at least entertained opinions against the prevailing university thought. I am now a happy graduate thanks to those brave souls, as Mr. Bloom's students give him similar thanks for making the age-old questions exciting and *consequential* in their lives.
Rating:
Summary: Messianic
Review: I couldn't overstate its importance. In a country devoted to rooting out and ridiculing elitists, or the educated, <I>American Mind</I> should not exist, particularly in a form that doesn't pander to ninth-grade comprehension. As a person who entered college vaguely hoping for some key to civilization that would change the course of my life, and who encountered nothing, I spent the next decade searching for something of this magnitude to affirm I was cheated. Yes, but Bloom posits an alternative to our thin, thin soil and the thin people that live on it, and offers a compelling glimpse of the minds that created us. Us, the world's most ahistorical and self-absorbed people, fulfilling a theoretical experiment of near-cosmic proportion? Even an American savage such as myself, one-dimensional but infected with longing, can build on these stones and find her way out, or so I believe. If you have a mind and an interior life, you've spent your life seeking this book.
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