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Summary: Bloom again helps literature blossom...
Review: Here is a book to launch an exploration of literature, to heighten the appreciation of great minds of Western civilization. Academics will be aggravated as usual by Bloom, his arrogant pronouncements, and his crowd-pleasing style. It must be so: in his sunset years Bloom is unrepentantly rebirthing himself as an intellectual Sir John Falstaff. And, Reader, if you will play young Prince Hal to Bloom's Sir John, you can enjoy his idiosyncratic hoodwinks and partake of his joie de vive! If you are among the multitudes for whom life has sometimes been at its most glorious among the dead (i.e., authors) and the never-living (their eternal characters), you will revel in this vast lyrical volume. It is truly a poetical, not an analytic work (despite Bloom's employing an organizing principle of Kabbalistic schemata). A love poem, at that -- erotically charged with both the fleshly and the mystical -- and unconcerned with superficial hobgoblins of consistency. Bloom means to inspire, to provoke, to spur you to drink from these geniuses' original springs, and for vast numbers of readers who can overlook Sir Harold's foibles (or rejoice with them), he will succeed surpassingly. One could wish the grace of more helpful editing had befallen the professor's final work and caught some of his contradictions and carelessnesses; he deserved to have an editor require better explication of his "definitions" and more follow-through on his arguments. But my sadness over the omission of such polishing strokes does not diminish my enthusiasm in recommending this volume to friends. Contrary to impressions given by some introductory statements, Bloom's analytical arguments about Genius and its roles in the spiritual and intellectual evolution of humanity are NOT the life force of this work. As in his other best-sellers (Shakespeare; Western Canon) it is Bloom's real passion to play the pelican and feed us literary children the life-blood of his love for literature and its creators. The very wildness of Sir Harold will aggravate the Prince Johns and Lord Chief Justices of the academies, but the Prince Hal within us will be positively infected with the need to pursue further intoxication among the Geniuses. Almost everybody will find *something* to be offended over somewhere in "Genius" -- since Sir Harold's extraordinary breadth of reading enables him to range over such a wide range of topics and his seniority has earned his personable-but-opinionated style a pronounced arrogance. I suggest the reader savor a little humility and overlook those idiosyncracies -- while resting uncompelled to accept every unexplicated conclusion Bloom offers -- and focus instead on draining this work for all the inspiration and insights that are pleasurably scattered throughout it. "Genius" passes the test that the professor in his introduction sets for any written work: "...has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified?" Yes: Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Or aspire to be one
Review: Here's a fun, kind of humiliating, game to play along with friends: open the book to any page and read one sentence out loud; the first person to know something about one of the words or one of the people gets a point/drink/gold star, etc. Which makes Bloom's book sound slightly comical and merely a toy to be used during party games. It is an intense book and like Pound's "Cantos," you'll find yourself following an endless and exhausting maze of leads, references, languages, and what-not, all in the hopes of learning just a bit more about some of the thinkers showcased here. You may not read it cover to cover, and that's ok; it's a book to be savored and slightly scared of at the same time. Recommended, with caution.
Rating: 
Summary: Subjective VIOLENCE
Review: I bought this book because 'GENIUS' was on the cover. But that is not what the book is for. It's filled with shadowed political and religious motivation. Be careful.
Rating: 
Summary: Huh, What's That You Just Said?
Review: I bought this book on impulse while shopping for something else because I thought it might illuminate me on which authors I would find interesting. I didn't follow my usual due diligence about book shopping. It is poetic justice, of a sort, that it proved a complete waste of $. I'd love to have that money back to buy something worthwile. Bloom's writing style is impossible to read, and his ruminations on why so-in-so did such-and-such are boring. I repeatedly caught myself reading while my mind was wandering on other thoughts completely unrelated to the subject at hand. I find his explanation for why he would have chosen these one hundred authors to write about strange. He says that he didn't choose these because they are the top one hundred in his or anyone else's judgement, but that he wrote about them because he "...wanted to write about these." Huh, what's that you just said? That's a brilliant explanation from someone who can write pages about what one character said to another on page 143 of a particular book. I also found the organization of the book clumsy. The grouping of authors into groups of ten, and then into to subgroups of five had no meaning, as Bloom readily acknowledges. But wouldn't the book, read by many for instructional purposes as in my case, have benefited from some literary-oriented or historically-oriented arrangement rather than these odd groupings? My only hope now is that I can unload this pile of paper at Half Price Books and reclaim a portion of what I wasted.
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Summary: My kind of critic
Review: I have always found Harold Bloom to be most precious for his gut passion and lack of academic snobbery and pandering. GENIUS is a delight to read and reminds me why I myself love great books. As a liberal arts student and a fiction writer, I often need a little break from the kind of criticsm which seeks to lock great books away from common readers and turn art into a kind of club rather than the open dialogue it really is. This book keeps me sane.
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Summary: Well, he got ME thinking about the 'classics' again
Review: I never would have picked up 'Genius' but for a friend pushing a copy on me. I mostly read contemporary fiction for relaxation or history for a little mind-stretching. I sure wouldn't think of reading Shakespeare or Dante or other dead poets! Anyway, Bloom sure hooked me on the idea of daring some of the classics. I don't know if I can buy all his conclusions about these guys' motivations and achievements but he sure has sold me on the value of checkin them out. At least the more readable ones. His kabalah stuff doesn't work for me but i just skim over that. It's the people that he makes intersting. And their ideas. He reminds me a of crotchety old english prof i had in college - not somebody I could ever figure out - let alone figure out what he wanted to ace his class - but a great provocateur. He and Bloom really love their stuff, and I think i'm going to too.
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Summary: Bloom: A human, desperate.
Review: I will admit, Shakespaere is a great writer. However, Bloom's obsesion with him is almost depressing. You will not read ten sentences in this book without a mention of the Bard. One of the most comical (and odd) examples of this is when Bloom is writing about Dostoevsky. He says, "The Underground man is his own Iago." First, he says that about almost everyone. Read Invention of the Human, and be prepered to encounter that sentence on every page of the book. But in the case of the Underground man it is particularly outrageous. The Underground man resembles Iago as Bloom resembles an unbiased critic: in absolutely no way. Read Othelo, then read Notes from the Underground, then read that comment. You will then question Bloom's ability to understand either. His comments about The Brothers Karamazov are equally sad. He says Dostoevsky's comment that 'in order to understand God's people you must understand God', sounds like a 'modern radical right winger' saying that God favors the republican party. He also in the same chapter makes the strange point that he has never been to a Boy Scout rally. He is obviously using this chapter as an excuse to push some unusual political point of his own. He also calls Dostoevsky a bigot, and said that he had a disease of the intellect. Well, if Dostoevsky did, perhaps Bloom should see a doctor. I think he might have caught it.
Rating: 
Summary: One hundred plus one
Review: Ignore the titles of Bloom's recent publications, whether they promise to explicate Shakespeare, examine the act of reading, or illuminate the mysteries of genius. They're essentially the same book--a continuing proclamation of likes and dislikes and list-making exercises by the great American oracle whose sins are too numerous to mention, or too easy to enumerate. On the whole, he's a useful authority figure whose judicious selections are well-served by his arrogance. If he's going to throw his weight around, we can be grateful he's championed worthy causes. Where he frequently comes up most short, it strikes me, is as a "close" reader of the texts to which he pledges his and our allegiance. And it is this lack of persistent proximity with his chosen texts that unavoidably raises doubt about the depth of his readings. Bloom likes "characters"--the Falstaffs, Hamlets, Ahabs--and he pleasures himself in being one. Like his favorite characters, he uses language less to dissect, analyze, and interpret experience than to portray his competencies, appetites, and judgements. An author such as Joseph Conrad passes his character test--until Kurtz. Unlike Marlowe, Bloom cannot be impressed by a "horror" that seems to elude its own author's comprehension. Similarly, he can credit Faulkner with creating memorable characters who embody racial relations in the old South but seems oblivious to the self-recognition that Faulkner's characters--the son of an octoroon, for example--are capable of awakening in the present-day reader. But it would take both a close and humble reader to see that Faulkner's "blackness" is the humanness that resides within us all and that Faulkner's incest is the pride that isolates us from our humanity, a commonness that must seem antithetical to the project of self-characterization. Exclusivity has its place. Call Bloom a genius at picking geniuses and let him fill your bookshelves. It's still the ordinary reader's job to discover why they belong there.
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Summary: Wrong title
Review: In the introduction, the author tells us that no, he really doesn't think he selected the 100 most brilliant people, or even the 100 most brilliant writers, of all time. He just selected 100 people he wanted to write about. So a better, more accurate title for this book would have been "100 People I Wanted To Write About". He organizes the book oddly, breaking down his 100 geniuses into groups of 5 and 10. The categories frankly make no sense at all to me. I enjoyed Clifton Fadiman's book Lifetime Reading Plan. It pointed the way to a lot of authors and books that I enjoyed, and a few I didn't. I tend to be an iconoclast, and if everyone is telling me that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a genius and a brilliant writer, and I read several of his books and stories and find them pretty awful, I'll think less of the person who recommended him to me. Hawthorne, who I believe was mediocre and overrated, is one of the geniuses in this book. His magic-based short stories are both predictable and idiotic, and The Scarlet Letter ends foolishly with Hester abandoning her beloved daughter and grandchild in order to return to the scene of her shame. Why would she do that? Has she no loyalty to her family? Is she a masochist? No I think Hawthorne made her do it, despite all common sense. It seems that if someone has a famous name, well he must be a genius. After all, he's on the reading list in high school. He must be brilliant. Twenty million flies can't be wrong. Harold Bloom is hard to read. Criticisms of his writing style that appear in these reviews seem just about right to me. I agree with what the other reviewers have said about him. I began this book at the beginning, reading the intro til I couldn't take it anymore, then proceeding to Shakespeare and to one of my favorites - Cervantes. I got something out of the Cervantes material, but then I read the next one, and the next, and decided to try to return the book to a local bookstore if they would take it. I'll say I got it as a gift and have no receipt. Needless to say, I think this book is not worth your money. Get Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan instead. That is a good one. A better title for this book would be "The Meanderings Of A Windbag".
Rating:
Summary: Quite simply...
Review: Mr. Bloom is unequivocally out of his well-read mind.
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