Rating: 
Summary: Another attempt by Bloom to push his agenda on literature
Review: They should have titled this "The Western Canon part two." Bloom gets to glorify his favorite poster boys Shakespeare and Freud again, as well as sermonize about others such as Cervantes, Mann and Faulkner (who have no business being called genuises).In addition, the title is also misleading in the sense that Bloom actually means, "Literary Creative Minds." Nowhere does he talk about Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Monet, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Schubert, Rachmaninoff etc etc etc. He also ignores two very creative literary figures; Dr. Suess and Vladimir Nabokov, two authors whose genius cannot be contested. It might be taken as arrogance that Bloom has only focused on literary genius, or what he takes to be genius. The implication is that writers, poets and philosophers have sole claim to the title "Genius." Actually, this is just the limitations of Bloom's training as an English Professor, as well as a product of his horrifically inventive and capable mind. Wouldn't one be biased towards literatures if they had spent their whole lives teaching and researching just that? This book is also produced on the assumption that the author knows exactly what makes a genius a genius. Although when one reads the book, the impression is that Bloom is far more fascinated with the works of the subject rather than the figures themselves, but this is what he does. So if you're searching for very incisive criticism on the lives of some very prominent people in the written history, delve in. If you're a student of music, art or even mathematics, this book is not about you. Bloom caters to the exclusive group of literateurs. This is precisely what Bloom wants though, exclusivity. He wants to banish what he thinks is mediocrity to the rafters where they can hoot and hollar to the ceiling, and leave us high-minded ones alone to our thoughts. A intriguing thought, yes, but mediocrity exists to give light to genius (didn't "Amadeus" teach us anything?). Genius only exists because the debate of genius continues, and while this book might be seen as such, it is really only a few steps away from it's big brother "Western Canon," a book in which Bloom says that a Canon cannot be defined, and yet in the appendices, attempts just such a Canon. Also with Bloom is the air that he's constantly looking over the tops of his glasses at us, trying to get us to read what he's read, agree with him, and just sit there in agreement. No thank you.
Rating:
Summary: Another attempt by Bloom to push his agenda on literature
Review: They should have titled this "The Western Canon part two." Bloom gets to glorify his favorite poster boys Shakespeare and Freud again, as well as sermonize about others such as Cervantes, Mann and Faulkner (who have no business being called genuises). In addition, the title is also misleading in the sense that Bloom actually means, "Literary Creative Minds." Nowhere does he talk about Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Monet, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Schubert, Rachmaninoff etc etc etc. He also ignores two very creative literary figures; Dr. Suess and Vladimir Nabokov, two authors whose genius cannot be contested. It might be taken as arrogance that Bloom has only focused on literary genius, or what he takes to be genius. The implication is that writers, poets and philosophers have sole claim to the title "Genius." Actually, this is just the limitations of Bloom's training as an English Professor, as well as a product of his horrifically inventive and capable mind. Wouldn't one be biased towards literatures if they had spent their whole lives teaching and researching just that? This book is also produced on the assumption that the author knows exactly what makes a genius a genius. Although when one reads the book, the impression is that Bloom is far more fascinated with the works of the subject rather than the figures themselves, but this is what he does. So if you're searching for very incisive criticism on the lives of some very prominent people in the written history, delve in. If you're a student of music, art or even mathematics, this book is not about you. Bloom caters to the exclusive group of literateurs. This is precisely what Bloom wants though, exclusivity. He wants to banish what he thinks is mediocrity to the rafters where they can hoot and hollar to the ceiling, and leave us high-minded ones alone to our thoughts. A intriguing thought, yes, but mediocrity exists to give light to genius (didn't "Amadeus" teach us anything?). Genius only exists because the debate of genius continues, and while this book might be seen as such, it is really only a few steps away from it's big brother "Western Canon," a book in which Bloom says that a Canon cannot be defined, and yet in the appendices, attempts just such a Canon. Also with Bloom is the air that he's constantly looking over the tops of his glasses at us, trying to get us to read what he's read, agree with him, and just sit there in agreement. No thank you.
Rating: 
Summary: yes but
Review: This is an expensive book - it has obliged me to fill a lot of "holes" on my shelves; a stimulating book - maddeningly perturbing; and as some reviewers cannot get past, monumentally egoistic. Science for Bloom (and that other Bloom, too) is anthropology - psychology, the social stuff that may strive to apply scientific methods but is far from natural science; and he (they) show, in their proclivity for cabalism and antipathy for imperial, dull and wrong "science", that they have, like the majority of Americans, never taken a single course in biology, evolution, geology, physics, cosmology; never read, say, Wilson, Darwin, Dennett, Lyle, Hawking, Weinberg, Sagan. Their "gnosticism" is a cheesy wriggling out of of both religion and science. If he/they want to make any reference to dogmas of science, he/they need to understand it a little. Science is not what they think it is. As one miffed reviewer notes, a piece in this book titled "X" may seem to be entirely about W, Y & Z; if X is no more than his/her context, he/she probably does not deserve a place in Bloom's 100. Why Bloom expects the world to sympathize with his Jewish cypher divisions is beyond me. If someone else used a Sanskrit index we wd mostly find it, what, adolescent? Insisting on the fundamentality of Jewish (religious) literature is one thing, indexing the whole of literature to a Hebrew cypher is another. Bloom gets a lot of credit from me for exciting arguments. One has the dismaying impression that he expects agreement, rather than argument; but this is also true of many of his chosen subjects. He mentions in the "Yahwist" that Yaweh ambushes Moses and, apparently arbitrarily, tries to kill him; an apt metaphor for elements of Bloom's text, perhaps. The whole is disparate, perhaps indigestible, pompous, infuriating, huge and delicious.
Rating: 
Summary: BORING
Review: This is one of the worst books I've ever read in my life. The book is a compilation of the works of 100 great literary figures, ranging from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky, with many obscure figures in between such as Hugo Von Hofmannstahl. Each chapter is devoted to one person containg brief excerpts from his or her work together with Mr. Bloom's comments purporting to show why that person is a "genius." Mr. Bloom's comments are random, pointless, and, in at least one case, internally contradictory. Nor does he ever clearly define the word "genius". Mr. Bloom's comments appear to be primarily designed to demonstrate his intimate knowledge (usually since childhood) of the literary figure's works. The purpose of the book, however, is clear, to show that no matter how big a genius these literary figures may be, the biggest genius of all is Harold Bloom.
Rating: 
Summary: The Bloom 100
Review: This thick book is Harold Bloom's meditation on literary genius, by which he means not exactly an extraordinary intelligence but a communication with the "God within," an internal source of world-expanding creative inspiration, that only few people manage to achieve. He selects one hundred authors -- the list, he stresses, is by no means hermetic -- in the literary canon who in his estimation have done this, subdividing them into ten groups of ten, each group represented by a concept from the Kabbalah called a Sefirah. For example, under Hesed, or "God's covenant love for men and women," he locates Donne, Pope, Swift, Austen, and others who he feels manifest various aspects (especially irony, one of his favorite topics) of such love. Which authors have genius? Shakespeare, obviously, and all the classical poets whose works have survived for a number of centuries, and Bloom's personal hero of literary criticism, Samuel Johnson, and even T.S. Eliot, towards whom Bloom displays a dichotomous attitude of admiration mixed with hostility. What evidence of genius is offered that elevates these authors above the merely talented? For Renaissance historian and prose stylist extraordinaire Walter Pater, it is his "secularization of the religious epiphany"; for Balzac, it is his mercurial comic criminal Vautrin; for Robert Browning, it is his perfected development of the dramatic monologue. I regard Bloom's opinions very highly and respect his efforts to rescue the best literature of the ages from forced obsolescence by the authorities of ephemeral ideologies in what he considers to be the intellectually decadent academic institutions, but I'm not blind to his idiosyncrasies as a critic (call them "Bloomisms") for which he surely would not apologize and which anybody approaching his criticism for the first time has to keep in mind. The most notable is his insistence on putting just about everything literary in relation to Shakespeare's major characters: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, and Lear. Next is his tendency to make thunderous declarations and magisterial assertions of canonical rank ("Proust is the last of the great novelists") which will hardly persuade an unimpressionable reader who isn't looking for a lecture. Past this, you will find that Bloom is so enthusiastic about the world's greatest literature and writes so well about his passion that it is immediately infectious. His desire is to motivate his readers to become better readers by demanding the highest standards, and so he isn't reticent about using superlatives to make his points. His dedication to literary quality highlights the book's greatest usefulness, which is to introduce or uncover important authors that are overlooked by or unknown to a large portion of readers; Montaigne, Saint Augustine, Carpentier, and Hart Crane are not widely read today, but Bloom argues cogently that they should be because their work is substantial and still relevant. Also, those authors whose works are of considerable cognitive difficulty are made more accessible to the common reader by Bloom's helpful clarifications of their themes. "Genius" is indeed bloated, but its bloat is of mostly informative commentary and more than a few entertaining quips. Bloom can be provocative: "Emma Bovary is Gustave Flaubert, and almost all the rest of us as well." Or humorous: "Dante, like the rest of us, suffered a great deal, but many of us would be hesitant before we peopled Hell with our personal enemies," he says about the "Inferno." Or incisive: "Freud, who wanted to be a third with Copernicus and Darwin, became a third with Montaigne and Goethe," he says about Freud's success as a mythmaking essayist despite, or perhaps as a result of, his (failed) aspirations to be a scientific revolutionary. He can also be pedantic and often acrimonious when mentioning his academic opponents; but most importantly he, more than any other current critic, is gracious enough to put up the signposts on the long, winding highway of Western literature, and for that reason I'm willing to take his side. After all, what have the ideological cheerleaders ever done for me?
Rating:
Summary: The Bloom 100
Review: This thick book is Harold Bloom's meditation on literary genius, by which he means not exactly an extraordinary intelligence but a communication with the "God within," an internal source of world-expanding creative inspiration, that only few people manage to achieve. He selects one hundred authors -- the list, he stresses, is by no means hermetic -- in the literary canon who in his estimation have done this, subdividing them into ten groups of ten, each group represented by a concept from the Kabbalah called a Sefirah. For example, under Hesed, or "God's covenant love for men and women," he locates Donne, Pope, Swift, Austen, and others who he feels manifest various aspects (especially irony, one of his favorite topics) of such love. Which authors have genius? Shakespeare, obviously, and all the classical poets whose works have survived for a number of centuries, and Bloom's personal hero of literary criticism, Samuel Johnson, and even T.S. Eliot, towards whom Bloom displays a dichotomous attitude of admiration mixed with hostility. What evidence of genius is offered that elevates these authors above the merely talented? For Renaissance historian and prose stylist extraordinaire Walter Pater, it is his "secularization of the religious epiphany"; for Balzac, it is his mercurial comic criminal Vautrin; for Robert Browning, it is his perfected development of the dramatic monologue. I regard Bloom's opinions very highly and respect his efforts to rescue the best literature of the ages from forced obsolescence by the authorities of ephemeral ideologies in what he considers to be the intellectually decadent academic institutions, but I'm not blind to his idiosyncrasies as a critic (call them "Bloomisms") for which he surely would not apologize and which anybody approaching his criticism for the first time has to keep in mind. The most notable is his insistence on putting just about everything literary in relation to Shakespeare's major characters: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, and Lear. Next is his tendency to make thunderous declarations and magisterial assertions of canonical rank ("Proust is the last of the great novelists") which will hardly persuade an unimpressionable reader who isn't looking for a lecture. Past this, you will find that Bloom is so enthusiastic about the world's greatest literature and writes so well about his passion that it is immediately infectious. His desire is to motivate his readers to become better readers by demanding the highest standards, and so he isn't reticent about using superlatives to make his points. His dedication to literary quality highlights the book's greatest usefulness, which is to introduce or uncover important authors that are overlooked by or unknown to a large portion of readers; Montaigne, Saint Augustine, Carpentier, and Hart Crane are not widely read today, but Bloom argues cogently that they should be because their work is substantial and still relevant. Also, those authors whose works are of considerable cognitive difficulty are made more accessible to the common reader by Bloom's helpful clarifications of their themes. "Genius" is indeed bloated, but its bloat is of mostly informative commentary and more than a few entertaining quips. Bloom can be provocative: "Emma Bovary is Gustave Flaubert, and almost all the rest of us as well." Or humorous: "Dante, like the rest of us, suffered a great deal, but many of us would be hesitant before we peopled Hell with our personal enemies," he says about the "Inferno." Or incisive: "Freud, who wanted to be a third with Copernicus and Darwin, became a third with Montaigne and Goethe," he says about Freud's success as a mythmaking essayist despite, or perhaps as a result of, his (failed) aspirations to be a scientific revolutionary. He can also be pedantic and often acrimonious when mentioning his academic opponents; but most importantly he, more than any other current critic, is gracious enough to put up the signposts on the long, winding highway of Western literature, and for that reason I'm willing to take his side. After all, what have the ideological cheerleaders ever done for me?
Rating:
Summary: Pound is missing...
Review: Where is Ezra Pound and also T.S.Eliot?How can he put Camões and forget Pound?Pound is one of the most significant poets ever and this "critic" forgot him?This man is a joke as critic and as a person.
Rating:
Summary: read the books yourselve's people
Review: You don't need some pretentious ass telling you what's great. I agree with the reviews sick of the shakespeare reference. Shakespeare was good, but many of the writers on here are alot better. In responsoe to one of the reviewers
"Science for Bloom (and that other Bloom, too) is anthropology - psychology, the social stuff that may strive to apply scientific methods but is far from natural science; and he (they) show, in their proclivity for cabalism and antipathy for imperial, dull and wrong "science", that they have, like the majority of Americans, never taken a single course in biology, evolution, geology, physics, cosmology; never read, say, Wilson, Darwin, Dennett, Lyle, Hawking, Weinberg, Sagan. Their "gnosticism" is a cheesy wriggling out of of both religion and science. If he/they want to make any reference to dogmas of science, he/they need to understand it a little. Science is not what they think it is." I agree that social sciences are almost pseudo sciences. All the good stuff in psych is just common sense. And yes, I have taken several courses in math, Physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry.(I even made it to state for biology in hs). I have also taken courses in philosophy and theology. I feel, unlike bloom, that science ad religion are very important. Science is not perfect though. Many of the great scientists you listed had atheistic agendas. Men such as Hawking are uncomfortable with the creational notions of the big bang, so they are always devising some ridiculous way to get around it. I think Hawking is probably overrated anyway because of his wheelchair condition.
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