Bloom Books

While Professor Bloom provides us with many ideas he seems to have mistaken the David for a junk pile at a flea market; careful exposition for cocktail-party twaddle. The major "thesis" of the work, called "revisionism," is that all poetry (meaning those poems which the author cites within the work) is an attempt to articulate meaning against both previous articulations and the abyss of the cosmos. The notion that all poetry is born of struggle is neither new nor revelatory; importing gnosticism and Freud into the commentary only muddies the waters. Struggle is not the same as "catastrophe" (a term he never defines) and incorporeal, intelligible structure is not the same as the yawning abyss. Professor Bloom also seems to conflate the seeing eye which views the cosmos and the touching hand which "feels" the cosmos hence, he is blind to the numerous references to vision in Emerson and others in favor of his pet thesis, all knowing is a grasping and deforming. Ironically, as he lashes out at the deconstructionists and the Lacanians for their inability to explain one or more art forms he, himself, is unable to conduct a serious, sustained reading of philosophy or literature. Indeed, the good professor never articulates the "difference" between poetry and philosophy. This fatal flaw renders the rest of his "radical" reading so much bric-a-brac. Perhaps we could turn his "reading" back upon himself and ask the honorable professor what sort of pre-adolescent "catastrophe" he is attempting to defend himself from by the creation of such an elaborate "theory of reading" or, even more on point, what type of "catastrophe" a Freudian "catastrophe theory" is attempting to work through.

The major benefit of the book is in its passionate argument that all poetry is indeed an attempt at articulating the structure of an otherwise mute cosmos. The rest is a procrustean coffin.

--Professor Bloom has been educating me for so long that I often lose sight of his exhilarating strangeness and originality. Whatever his professional destiny as critic, scholar, university professor, editor, book reviewer, et al., the total simultaneous shape of his Oeuvre is what will swing into focus for posterity - we will come at length to an astounding prayer. AGON is the capstone to Bloom's vision of literary history, sweeping us away in a critical saga whose heterodoxy could overtake Gravity's Rainbow. Hellenistic Gnosticism as "a way of telling a story," Lurianic Kabbalah as a paradigm for reading poetry, William Blake and the empyrean cinema of cosmic catastrophe, Sigmund Freud's defensive trend-to-disorder as the genesis of all creative drive, and this in the first hundred pages! Bloom's rhetoric is dense, difficult, Promethean in its striving to induce fire in the proper reader. His procedures are undersung by a desire and affinity for Gnosis, a literary knowledge which is "better and older than the stars."
--Whether his cathedral of brilliant minutiae is ever wielded into a whole, three hundred pages later, is open to debate. What remains regardless is in my view the strongest example of literary criticism published in the 1980s - grandiloquence stamped to search and burn the world.

This book (and the previous review) seems to typify just how far Nietzsche has penetrated into academe and what strange poses he is being forced to take. When Bloom states that "the language...of criticism ought to be pragmatic and outrageous..."(p.19) we wonder if he is really aware of the contradiction in such a viewpoint. For, as the high priest of pragmatism, William James, frequently stated "pragmatism [is] a mediator and reconciler..."(Pragmatism Chapt. 1). Pragmatism, in other words, is an elaborate justification of conformity. It may not be pragmatic at some time to epater le bourgeoise and it is certainly not outrageous to mediate or reconcile. The Yale professor is trying to square the circle. This paradox runs through the work as, on another occasion, we're told that "it [ie. the work in question] cannot become the American religion until it first is canonized as American literature" (p.150). Jeremiah must become a literature professor at Yale, it would seem. Bloom's (and our ecstatic reviewer's) blindness to this problem is difficult to account for.

Returning to our opening claim, Bloom's desire to outrage is rooted in his admiration of Nietzsche's glorification of the poetic soul freely creating worlds ex nihilo. We point out in-passing that his avowed opponents, the franco-heideggerian deconstructionists, also trace their roots to this philosopher. What we appear to be reading is an academic quarrel among tenured radicals who are trying to figure out whether they must eat the little end or the big end of the egg first. For Bloom, "the true ship is the shipbuilder" and "right reading is not reading well" (p.20). Rather than creating worlds ala Nietzsche, Bloom believes in creating interpretations. When we read and interpret we produce a text which is itself a "misreading" of the text we are attempting to read. Misunderstanding is more important than comprehension and the job of the critic is to provoke, rather than to explain. [In this respect he is in union with his academic "targets."] The sad fact here is, however, that there is no way to determine a sound from an unsound reading, an accurate one from a child's scrawlings on a napkin (p.16). This is the night in which all cows are black and Nietzsche's philosopher suffers from the same incoherence, only he attempts to seek refuge in the classification of interpretations as "noble" and "base." Since noble and base are judgments made by others, they are as arbitrary as the creations they purport to laud or condemn. No one has yet successfully unified James and Nietzsche; convention and radicalism.

If we pay attention to the attempts at "criticism" in the work we are thoroughly disheartened to discover that Bloom has chosen to ignore the obvious in favor of the ridiculous. While dismissing the blatant Hegelianism of Emerson, he prefers to run him through the Freudian meat grinder in an attempt to reclaim the Concord sage as 100% American. The silliness of such an activity should be self-explanatory. Bloom, of course, would not object to this characterization since "misreading" is more important than understanding (p.16). It is odd that he expresses such faith that his critics will, one day, understand him. "Upon what evidence do you make such a claim," we ask. Again, the longing for public acceptance overrides the desire to be "outrageous." On a more serious note, the need for Bloom to marshall the various and oppositional forces of gnosticism, kabbala, psychoanalysis and pragmatism bespeaks a reader's sensibility which is fundamentally impoverished. His heroes, Johnson, Empson, Wilde, and Pater felt no need to adopt an alien method or religion because they saw themselves as reconnecting with the work and brushing away the sediment of dull, received opinion. Kabbalah and gnosticism insist that God is "x" but pragmatism believes that it only matters if we act upon it and psychoanalysis tells us that the whole thing is just a defense mechanism to deal with the difficulties of living. Why the Yale professor chose to ignore this obvious incompatibility is deeply troubling for it speaks volumes about the quality of scholarship in our most elite universities.

What are the prerequisites for performing a strong reading of this strongest of critics? Wherefore the mirth and mettle to become equal to Bloom's (at times) terrifying paradigmata for the belated student of literature? Bloom acknowledges Neil Hertz for likening his books to a perverse blend of Piransi and Rube Goldberg, dismissing our critic's oeuvre as a scatterbrain "melange of homemade contraptions and imaginary spaces." Bloom's response to this is characteristically funny and ingenious, not to mention invigorating. "I accept this but universalize it.... The triumphant point of a Rube Goldberg is not that it is a twittering machine, or that it goes through amazing, far-fetched convolutions in order to perform a simple operation in a howlingly complicated way, BUT THAT IT WORKS -- not by getting the job done, but by an audacious inventiveness that exposes, however parodistically, the truth that the job's aim cannot be distinguished from its origins"(45). A critical pragmatist will derive the means of his analysis out of the special requirements demanded by the text under review. If, for example, the poetry of William Blake seems to call for the disinterment of certain secular religious traditions (whether Gnostic, Kabbalistic, or Freudian), the critic has every incentive to explore and enlarge upon these paradigms, to bring the spiritual history of mankind to bear upon the younger text. Virtually all of Bloom's detractors refuse to come to terms with his bare-bones speculative Pragmatism, wherein a theory's "truth" lies in its workability and use-value, rather than on a logical schemata of spec and modelization. "Poetry and criticism are useful not for what they really are, but for whatever poetic and critical use you can usurp them to, which means that interpretive poems and poetic interpretations are concepts you make happen [poetry], rather than concepts of being [philosophy]"(39). The transmittance of power from master to ephebe entails the birth-pang zero-hour of "catastrophe-creation," a breaking open of the visionary structure in order to reassemble oneself into a stronger, more originary consciousness, where the ephebe must come to terms with the epistemological brainwashing performed on him by Academe, by his previous, idealizing views of literature and the arts, by friends, family, and other institutional bric-a-brac which mediate (and derange) the Gnostic self, the soporific realm of our Lethean, amnesiac culture. Bloom's criterion is elitist and solitary, the nonpareil of a re-visionary Gnosticism which he's powerfully and complexly developed over the past thirty years.... And as any student of religious tradition can attest, one should *never* (as the previous reviewer has) mistake spiritual difficulty for theoretical vagueness, which is to say, unless one has read and reread all of Bloom from *Anxiety*(1973) to *Omens*(1996), he or she should refrain from making superficial judgements on this, one of the most advanced critical endeavors undertaken since Northrop Frye....

If all of this sounds like hero-worship, the youthful ramblings of a bright-eyed readerly lap-dog (and it probably is), I would only urge the potential reader not to *underestimate* the range of difficulties, both cognitive and spiritual, which Bloom requires of his (ideal) readers, a difficulty blundered through and misconceived by virtually every philosophy major I've encountered. Bloom believes that philosophy is "a stuffed bird" dead on the mantlepiece, that the American academic attempt to conflate Logic and Philosophy into a single, arch-pedantic discipline has nothing interesting to say about the exigencies of poetic apprenticeship. "If we ever get a rigorous philosophy of the Lie, then we may be close to a useful philosophy of poetry"(41). What truly matters in the best poetry, criticism, and philosophy does not need to be strictly "differentiated" in the first place. If one truly needs a philosophical explanation circumscribing the "difference" between poetry and theory, then I would recommend Chap. 7 of Deleuze & Guattari's *What is Philosophy?*. (But as Bloom might say, "Deleuze's problems are not MY problems.") Only a scholarship that reads itself AS literature can become equal TO literature, a stance which can never be assimilated by the philosophical overconfidence which characterizes contemporary Academe. Bloom's central objective in his theoretical phase (1973-1982), as I map it, is to explore and elevate paradigms for reading, to elaborate new slants on "old" traditions, to revivify the art of memory to selectively "free" ourselves from the daemon of Anteriority. The previous reviewer, in an agony of illiterate pedantry, is looking for "theses" to be proved or disproved, "arguments" to be exposed and deconstructed as hypocritical and self-refuting, logic-puzzles to be foreordained and then definitively solved. Professor Bloom, in the line of Hazlitt and Pater, is much too ahead of the game aesthetically to be dragged down by such a-pragmatic resentment. If one wishes to "refute" Bloom, he or she must provide stronger, more productive readings of the specific texts under review (Blake, Freud, Emerson, Whitman, Lindsay, Stevens, Crane, Ashbery, Hollander, and their peers), and not build a polemical soapbox out of irrelevancies such as Bloom's purported failure to articulate the "difference" between the poem and the concept. Was this really Bloom's objective, after all? In the postmortem realms of academic philosophy, a misplaced punctuation-mark can tear down an entire argument, a fatal mote of dust can devastate the whole architectonic machine of logic and rationality. Bloom's theories are only as "correct" as they provide useful paradigms for reading, as they enliven the reader's perception of the text, as they grant power to the suffering ephebe. It would seem to me that the previous reviewer has spent a lot more time reading "theory" than actual novels, poems, plays, short stories, and so is not in a position to play the radical game Bloom has been cultivating in book after book. Strong poetry requires strong readers to carry on the struggle, not pseudo-philosophical pedants piddling after nonexistent truth-functions.

IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT I GET IN TOUCH WITH DR. NORMAN BLOOM. IF ANYONE HAS AN EMAIL ADDRESS WHERE I CAN REACH HIM, PLEASE SEND IT TO ME AT :dcent50@aol.com

My review is slightly influenced by the fact that Dr. Bloom has performed two unrelated surgeries on me. Both were for liposarcoma, the first in 1995 was imbedded in the small muscle in my axilla (underarm between the bicep and tricep), and the second in March, 2001 in my trapezia(shoulder). Dr. Bloom was recommended to me and my primary physician by a local surgeon in Danbury, CT as one of the top two soft tissue cancer surgeons in the New York area. These operations were both on my right arm, the last being March 20th and I played an hour of tennis yesterday with very little pain. As far as his book, from a layperson's view it is quite interesting to see the incredible detail that the surgeon encounters to ensure not only that the cancer is eliminated, but that the person can still function in the best possible manner once they are healed. My mother had both a colon and liver resection 6 years ago, and now I can visualize what she had done. It is still mysterious to me but I appreciate it more nonetheless. If you are going to have cancer surgery, you may want to consider sending your surgeon an anonymous copy of this book! If you are a surgeon or practioner, this has to help your craft. The price may seem a bit steep, but when you consider the quality of the artwork and that the book will probably not make the NY Times bestseller list, it is well worth it.

...in that as a radiation oncologist, I need to design my treatment plans based in part on what the surgeon has seen and does. This book shows that to me. Merely knowing that s/he did a pancreaticoduodenectomy doesnt tell me much about what invasive approach was used to get that end result. this book is terrific for the student, resident, non surgical oncologist who needs to know something about what these surgeries are. No, its not a "definitive text" and that's not its purpose. I dont want to be a surgeon but I need to know about these procedures- this pictorial makes it clear and makes me do my job all the better. A must for rad onc residents involved with 3D and IMRT planning in particular.

ý bought this book with enthusiasim and paid lots of money.but its so insufficent that ý now think its only for students. it doesnt have detailed knowledge about new oncological surgical pirincipals and thecknics.

This book dissects the personality of Poe from his works and since it is a biography it deals with some of the more negative aspects of Poe as well as the positive one's.There are alot of reproductions of letters written by Poe in regard to his personal life as well as letters written to him.Some very flattering others less so,as if he may have had a "mood disorder".His criticisms of others works the author defends as almost entirely just, but it is also pointed out Poe was occasionally susceptible to flattery,particularly if there a financial renumeration or a" well turned ankle" involved.This is one work where Poe's use of laudenum(a mixture of opium and alcohol) receives attention.apparently this drug was a common stock at the doctor's office(not to mention the street vendor)and was used and prescribed for alot of people."Opium dreams",a common phrase,could have been one of Poe's inspirations,a mind of his calibre would certainly remember and be able to profoundly describe those visions of paradise(and horror)!!it is obvious to me that the author of this book admires and respects Poe, but keeps his distance for the sake of his interpretation of the truth.The 1840's with no copyright laws and high illiteracy would not make much opportunity for men like Poe other than "free lancing"an open invitation for "economic violence".Woodberry's book reads smoothly and pretty much gets to the essence of Poe in my opinion.

this book is a good information sorce on the american poet edger allen poe. it talks about his life and his poetry. verry cute.

a pretty good book. it's definently a good read for those interested in poe.

This book is shallow, judgemental, poorly researched and an insult to any the intelligence of any thinking person. There are some marvelous biographies about Edgar Allan Poe (The one by pulitzer prive winning biographer, Kenneth Silverman, is the best.) To call this a STUDY guide is absurd. It's a slanted, bias, narrow minded piece of propoganda.

Wow! I wonder why I've never read any of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works before. This short book was tremendously well written, with wonderful imagery and amazing use of language. The text conjures up clear images of the period, and you can almost taste the dust, feel the heat, and hear the sounds of the settings described. While I found the characters to be largely unsympathetic and much too self-absorbed, I still found myself facinated with the story and unable to put the book down. What a wonderful reflection of an age and society that has long since disappeared.

Younger readers who've never been taught of American history and contemporary economics won't understand this book fully. This book is about capitalism's potential problems that are still seen today.

The most magnificant points about this novel are the different connections of relationships between Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Myrtle, Mr. Wilson, Nick and Jordan. Furthermore, the alteration of Gatsby's materialistic dream to his connected dream of materialism, love and his past with Daisy.

This book agrandized our lives after completing this masterpiece. At first, the book was slow, but after it picked up momentum, it never slowed. F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most coveted authors in all american literature. He is a mastermind in all of art's history. He uses ordinary situations and makes them come to life.

Bloom's well-researched study of baseball collectors in the 1980s is a wonderful text for studying and teaching about masculinity and popular culture. His book raises important questions about the crisis of masculinity in the latter part of the twentieth century, and the ways that popular culture practices like baseball card collecting both challenged and, ultimately, shored up traditional gender boundaries between men and women. Bloom's work also focuses extensively on the issue of nostalgia, particularly the idealized memory of 1950s American boyhoods. An accessible and engaging tone makes this a fine text to use in popular culture classes or in gender studies classes.

Bloom's well-researched study of baseball collectors in the 1980s is a wonderful text for studying and teaching about masculinity and popular culture. His book raises important questions about the crisis of masculinity in the latter part of the twentieth century, and the ways that popular culture practices like baseball card collecting both challenged and, ultimately, shored up traditional gender boundaries between men and women. Bloom's work also focuses extensively on the issue of nostalgia, particularly the idealized memory of 1950s American boyhoods. An accessible and engaging tone makes this a fine text to use in popular culture classes or in gender studies classes.

As a baseball card collector for over 20 years, I have read countless articles in countless publications about baseball cards and card collecting. Almost every one of the has focused on either the financial aspects of the hobby or on how great it is to be a collector. John Bloom has written a thought provoking and academic book which examines WHY we collect.

While I do not agree with some of the authors positions, specifically about race and homoerotocism, I feel that they are well thought out and presented. His description of the MCC, a card collectors club, is very similar to my own experiences in the two clubs to which I have belonged in the past, and offers a unique look at the pettiness and power struggles that often arise in these organizations.

Many collectors and hobby writers came out very strongly against this book, but I think that many of them looked at Blooms' conclusions as an attack on the hobby of card collecting. They are not.

While the academic tone of the book can make it difficult to read at times, the insights that it offers and the fact that it at least makes the reader THINK about the nature of collecting are reason enough to read "House of Cards".

Collecting baseball cards evokes memories of crisp wax paper; the assault of a preadolescent nose with the aroma of sickly sweet, often stale, powder-sugar coated bubble gum; the thrill of your first Ted Williams card; and of clothes-pinning your sixth Pedro Ramos in your bicycle spokes.

In stark contrast, Bloom's book portrays collectors in the angry, white man role; discusses the collector's insecurities about their rapidly declining social position; their disturbing attitudes toward blacks and women; and their apparent inability to get a date in high school. Why is Bloom saying such disparaging things about the people who collect baseball cards?

Bloom spent some time in the late 1980s attending baseball card shows in Minnesota. His observations at the shows, sports card shops, interviews with hobbyists, and secondary research, form the basis for this adaptation of his doctoral thesis.

Baseball card collecting can evolve from a children's hobby to an adult's business. But the hobby took on an entirely new dynamic during the Reagan years. Many American boys collected cards, and in the economic boom of the 1980s, price's escalated, and collectors found (if mom hadn't gotten there first) treasure troves in long-forgotten, old shoe boxes. Unfortunately, many believed, including Bloom, that the newfound wealth corrupted the hobby.

Bloom's typical adult collector is white, male, and lower-middle class. In turn, Bloom blames these card collectors for failed marriages, deceit, deception, the manipulation of children, the exclusion and derision of women, and distancing the races.

But is the assertion valid that adult collectors are sexist, merely because the majority are male? Similarly, are they racist because a majority are white? Is the fact that Mickey Mantle's 1952 Topps rookie card sells at a higher price than Willie Mays' 1952 card, justifiable evidence of racism among the collecting enthusiasts as the author brazenly maintains?

The impact and social ramifications of collecting baseball cards appear to be stretched beyond the realm of plausibility to make an alarming, though questionable, point. Is it possible that collecting bits of cardboard, emblazoned with the images of childhood heroes, really be the cause of this much social discord?

But the author has missed a critical point. Bloom states that the cards, in and of themselves, "are of no real consequence." Most collectors would vehemently disagree. Baseball cards derive their value by resurrecting the reminiscences of the collector's youthful heroes. There is a collective social memory which envelops the collectors and their cards. The fact that trade guides indicate that selected cards may have some extrinsic value is nice, but for the majority of collectors, not paramount. The same native affinity does not permeate collecting spoons, stamps or coins, or even football or basketball cards. The fact that these collectibles are baseball cards matters a great deal.

The story was great but she needed to go more in depth about the monster because their is too much mystery about him. Like how he was created, where his body parts came from stuff like that.

I thought the book really kept me on my toes. Mary Shelley had a great insight into what can happen to a person when their knowledge starts to control them. The book was a good read.

I can't speak highly enough of Bloom's notes in general. They are distinctly different from other summary-type works in that much of the book is critical reviews, while the rest is a structural and thematic analysis. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone enrolled in high level literature classes (such as myself) or anyone who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of the novel, not just a cursory plot summary.

Because 2/3 of this book is just articles on the work, I would not suggest the book if you are just trying to use it to help you remember details of the book. Still, it does have a pretty good summary and fair character analysi

This story is about a girl and her dead bother. She talked about her brother and it eases the pain. She lived in a tribe. Her tribe lived in the desert. They owned a bunch of sheep.

Nadia the Willful was a great story. The setting of the story was in the Middle East many years ago. The main characters were Madia, Sheik and Tari. My favorite character was Nadia because she always helped people. I would recommend this book to people ten to thirteen years old.

This story started in the desert were this little ear tipered girl was and her brother was the only one who made her happy.But one day her brother hamed went in the desert and never came back and her father said any one who spoke of his name they would be puneched.And one day a sheperd boy got couht speaking of Hameds name and he was going to be vanesed .But Nadia spoke to her father and they speak of Hameds name today.

This is a wonderful story about the different reactions to death told through a child's eyes. It is a somewhat simplistic story about a sister and her family's loss of the oldest brother. When you lose a loved one you have two choices; to try to block out the pain and in the process block out the memory of that person or to celebrate that life keeping the memory alive in your heart.

Victorian literature is vast, for the era it covers was long and complex. This collection of Victorian prose and poetry distinguishes itself with its range. Features a fine bibliography and is well indexed. Also recommended: the companion book, Victorian Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Austin Wright, a Galaxy book GB 52. (Try zshops.) Victorian literature received careful and respectful study in the Twenties and Thirties. These anthologies show the fruit of that labor. Highly recommended.

It's got everything you could ask for from an anthology of English literature, with excellent footnotes and introductory materials. A real treasure trove for students of the Victorian era. Comprehensive index.

...and surely we wouldn't want to find ourselves inadequately prepared for graduate study.

This anthology appears to have been transported in a time machine from the 1950s. It is narrow both in its range of authors and subject matter and completely out of step with recent Victorian studies. Students gaining their knowledge of the Victorian period from this anthology would not only have a distorted view of the period, but would also find themselves inadequately prepared for graduate study. See the review of this anthology on the Victorian web.

Emma learns the news of her sisters death and as her only family must return to her home town after leaving fifteen long years ago and never looking back. Her painful past resurfaces as she must encounter the only man she has ever loved. Will this only serve to stir up the dust that covers the pain of dreams shattered long ago, or will the cleansing of Emma's past shine new light upon her future and pave a way towards a dream she has never dared give hope?
This story was one that I read late into the night and I must say it was refreshing. Although,I loved the story the ending could use a little bit more depth. It has a good closer though.
Hope you enjoy the book!

This book is a sweet look at how a tragic separation turned two peoples' lives upside down. Now 15 years later, these two come back together for a second chance. It is a enjoyable read, great for a light afternoon read. The characters are enjoyable and the plot has some interesting turns at the end.

Lori Copeland's writings are typically light hearted, yet carry a deep message. After reading several serious chapters of this book, I checked the front cover to make sure Lori was the author! It is the story of a young woman, Emma, who believes she has escaped the hurt of her past by running away, making a new life for herself. Fifteen years later, tragedy places her in the center of the pain she sought to deny. Ultimately, the author's typical humor cannot be denied. The addition of humor is equal to the changes in the heart of the characters. An example of this is on page 218, when Sam, the man who jilted Emma long ago, comes for a visit on Christmas morning. It begins with Sam's greeting:
"'How's my girl this morning?'
'I'm not your girl.'
'How's my grouch this morning?'
She smiled."
A great read about hurting and healing from God's love and faithfulness!

When Emma's sister leaves the family home to her and Sam Gold, it seems like a nightmare. Emma has spent years fighting the emotions her break up with Sam left her with. Neithier of the two are completely over each other and it seems her sister was trying her hand at matchmaking. However, still caring about each other and wanting a future are two different things.

These two will deal with a lot of emotional battles and conflicts throughout the telling of this story. Emma must also find a faith and belief in God again, when she had given up so many years ago. This book takes the reader on not only an emotional journey but a spirtual one as well.

Full of action, one never knows what to expect next. There are several incidents of strange animals/bugs being let loose in the house in an attempt to force them into a sell out. Any fan of inspirational or contemporary should enjoy this!

I received my item on time and in the described condition. Everything smooth with my purchase.

the condition is so good but it takes quite long to be in my hand

If you are looking for a graduate level introduction and explanation of strategic management concepts, this is a solid choice. If you expect nice illustrations for texts at this price point - and a readable font for those of us who can't handle small print - look elsewhere. Graduate textbook are expensive because we are a captive audience, and this book is lacking some of the nicer mechanical tools that other graduate texts have at its price range.
The material is laid out well, there aren't superfluous stories, and the progression is logical. I am likely to keep this book after the class is finished.

This book was a necessary evil for a capstone MBA class.
It contains information that could be useful to someone that hasn't looked at MBA texts before, but in my case I feel like "well duh! I already know this!"

To make things worse, there are factual errors in the book that make it frustrating to read.
Furthermore (having read all of the book) the writing and grammar is awful! Didn't anyone proof read this book?

Overall, I would say that this is an OK book so far as theory is concerned - but it was rushed to go into production which brings its redeeming qualities down.