However, he does an unbelievably good job in describing the ills in the "social sciences" and how we have arrived today at a place where graduate students study comic books and MTV is a weighty topic of intellectual speculation and where old masters like Aristotle are almost dissapeared (Does this reflect poorly on Aristotle or on ourselves?). For anyone who wonders at where we went wrong in the twentieth century, Bloom is like a breath of fresh air in the unwholesome swamp of the modern research university. Much of what I felt during years of instruction/indoctrination as a university student is plainly and eloquently laid out by Bloom - he seems to give voice to what was inchoate in my soul on this important issue.

It is not easy reading - even for the well educated. But nothing worth doing was ever easy, and if you want "fun" and "light" you can always open up a comic book again. On the other hand, if you really want to stretch your mind and engage certain "Big Questions" (whether you agree with Bloom or not), then read "The Closing of the American Mind."

It was the most important book I have read in years. Bloom may overstate his case at times, but there is the essential kernel of truth in what he says, in my opinion. Great intoduction also by Saul Bellows.


An ironic play on words...   June 27, 1997
 0 out of 3 found this review helpful

This would have been a better title for an Alan Bloom autobiography.

I feel the best review on this book I can give is a quote from Jello Biafra's "High Priest of Harmful Matter":

"I can think of one mind that was so closed that he didn't bother to peer into it before ranting and raving on paper because he'd been welding it shut all those years."

This book could have easily been written by Tipper Gore or Jesse Jackson or the like. It is written to appeal to people who consider themselves "liberals" (the yuppie crowd) and parroted exactly what groups like the PMRC and the Moral Majority said about rock music in the eighties.

If you believe rock music is the great scapegoat on which to blame all of parents' failures, then this book is for you. For the rest of us, don't be deceived by the title.


An excellent,stimulating critique of American (non) thought   October 23, 1996
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

Although a few years old, Bloom's _Closing of the American Mind_ is still a tour de force in assessing the state of American thought. Bloom contends that our society suffers from a neurotic open-ness to almost any opinion except the opinion that some positions have (innately) more merit than others. We are intolerant of the concepts of good and value in our thought life and in our spiritual world. Bloom recommends a rerurn (or progression, possibly) to a worldview that is at once more rigorous and ultimately more "open minded" in the truest sense.