Bloom Books

I had to read this dumb book for english class. It was the hardest book to understand. The use of volcabulary was astounding. He couldnt just state something, Dickens had to go and use every word in his volcabulary. It has soooooo many word that you get lost. I read the chapters over and over and never understood them. The next day my teacher would tell us what the chapters were about. Only then did i understand the book. BEWARE THIS BOOK WILL FRY YOUR BRAIN BEFORE YOU UNDERSTAND IT.

Dickens wrote a great story in this book, the only problem he had was he explained the parts in a little bit too much detail. The cliff notes would be a big help in reading this great story.

Amazon.com requires a reviewer to write something more here. :-)

Thus, I would say again, "Read Mr. Emerson's thoughts in his original material."

Can you feel "the lift beneath your wings" from reading BRAHMA?

Can you better appreciate a friend when you read Emerson writing that, "A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature."?

Emerson essays are like the orphic and Eleusinian celetial odes that inspire and guide every awakened intellect. Similar to Plutarch essays which are divine physicians for the Soul. They never leave the reader where he found himself initially, The writtings uplift one to a higher Elysian sphere.
Dr Dimitri Karalis
Cape Town
South Africa

My interest in Eugene O'Neill has extended to researching his early life in Argentina. An article written by me on this topic was included in the 2007 edition of Bloom's Modern Critical Views. My order for a copy of this book (believing it to be currently available) was answered with an out of date 1987 (probably remaindered) edition. This represented an expensive failure for me. I have asked for it to be replaced.

I'm writing a thesis regarding the tragic mode in works ranging from Aueschylus' Oresteia to Miller's Death of a Salesman, works that include O'Neil's Mourning Becomes Electra. In using this book as a reference I have been able to create a thesis that is both informed and interesting. Great book...

NO PICTURES or even drawings of any kind make this book virtually useless (4 me anyway). Why anyone would put out a gardening book without pictures is beyond me. Especially when you are making specifing recommendations. printed 1987.

Also, another reviewer of another Lovejoy book "The Border in Bloom" says "Lovejoy gardens in the warmest part of the Puget Sound area, and her plant picks reflect that - it would be nice if she had included more information on hardiness zones, at least for the more marginal varieties."

I'm still looking for a list of hardy year round BRIGHT, LIGHT,,COLORFUL folilaged perennials for the Pacific NorthWest.

Right now I'm taking her suggestions and punching them into the computer, searching for pictures. So far her recommendations are very drab.

This is the first of Anne's books that I've read and loved and I have since ordered a few more and have met Anne at a class on borders I took at her new Sequoia Center on Bainbridge Island. While the book lacks pictures (still necessary for me) her writing is informative, fun, motivational and reflects a true love of gardening and plants that is infectious. Anne's gardens are casual and comfortable with an emphasis on shapes, colors and textures that go beyond flowers, are easy-care and are really beautiful ever-evolving works of art. She helps you learn that it's okay to get in there and take risks in the garden, and it works!

This book has simply delightful flower arrangements and fabulous photograpghs for the busy, trendy woman!

I bought this book based on the glowing editorial reviews. Unfortunately, I am somewhat disappointed. * There are lots of pretty close up pictures of flowers but there are no STEP-BY-STEP pictures of each stage of the arrangement. * Some arrangements do not even show the final product. Others show artistically blurry pictures of blooms. * For beginners like myself, it is difficult to make the arrangements by only relying on words.

FINAL VERDICT: Buy this book for your coffee table but get Jane Packer's Fast Flower Arranging for more hands-on practice. If you are a Japanese flower arrangement fan, get Reiko Takenaka's Enchanting Ikebana. This is the best step-by-step book with pictures for each step and explicit directions.

Received this book and found the inside to contain a book on diet and nutrition. Based on my understanding of the description, the contents would have covered Assertiveness training for women. Stange!

As a Psychologist, over the years, I have strongly recommended the reading of the original edition of this book, which has helped people (yes, men as well as women) to improve their lives and relationships by teaching them how to speak up in a strong, positive, effective way. Looking to purchase another out-of-print copy, I was very excited to see that a new edition has finally come out! I intend to buy several, and give them to people I care about.

My all time favorite book has been Martin Chronicles, so this is a very great surprise for me, to read several essays from different experts. And learn more about such classic.

And it doesn't end there, they analyze more of his stories. I don't know if Mr. Bradbury will agree on this book, but it did enlight me.

From Harold Bloom's Modern Critical Views series, this book collects
critical essays discussing one of America's most unique storytellers,
sci-fi/fantasy writer Ray Bradbury. Although one applauds Bloom's acumen in
choosing Bradbury as a subject worthy of elucidation, the actual essays
selected are really rather disappointing. Perhaps the fault lies not with
the editor (whose bona fides are so widely recognized), but with a general
dearth of meritorious criticism regarding an author who works principally in
the literary ghetto that is known as 'genre' fiction. Most of the scholars
represented here have picked up some specific quality that seems noteworthy
in a few of his works, and have explicated this quality in some detail, but
none seem able to view the man's work as a whole, or evaluate its overall
import. Perhaps closest is William F. Touponce's cryptic essay "The
Existential Fabulous: A Reading of Ray Bradbury's 'The Golden Apples of the
Sun'", but his 'oneiric' approach is aimed at the serious scholar, not the
casual reader. More commonplace are Diskin's "Bradbury on Children", and
Hazel Pierce's "Ray Bradbury and the Gothic Tradition", with emphasis on the
horror genre, and the pieces by Wayne Johnson and Gary Wolfe, which focus
more on the famous sci-fi collection The Martian Chronicles. It is typical
of the narrow focus of this volume that only Kevin Hoskinson's fascinating
political study "Ray Bradbury's Cold War Novels" does more than mention the
master's finest novel, Fahrenheit 451. This reviewer would much rather have
seen some in-depth analysis of Bradbury's style (which is surely one of his
strong points), and more attention given to his many short stories, which
are certainly superior to most of his novels. Inquisitive readers who come
to this book wondering why this fine, but often overlooked writer is deemed
worthy of criticism at all will come away knowing little more than they came

in with.

As a animal's portrait artist I'm always purchassing animal's pictures and comments of their behavior . The pictures in this book are good and in some of them very sensitive . The comments are inteligent and I learn a lot of thing.

This item was okay, but it had the same exact pictures that were in the big UNTAMED book. I did not realize that it was more of a childrens book than an adult book. I was not expecting this and I was a little disappointed.

I bought this book hoping to learn more about certain works I love, and other works I am not yet familiar with. What is it that makes some works continue to touch us, even after thousands of years?

Unfortunately, he's not very interested in answering this question. Taking it as a given that the Western Canon is good and therefore everything else must be bad, this book is political more than literary. Although there were a few interesting bits here and there, any pleasure I might have had was completely destroyed by this guy's tendency to go off on rants. He genuinely can't get over the fact that some universities attribute worth - maybe even equal worth - to the works of women and minorities, for instance, and, although I disagree, I would have ignored it if he hadn't kept coming back to this theme - and talking about the other side of this debate as if they were genuinely evil, Communists or lepers or something that must be eradicated.

Bloom knows nothing about art, which is a living, moving, dynamic process. Art keeps going, even when stodgy old idiots fail to keep up. In fact, much of the greatest art was called trash in its day by stodgy old idiots who thought that only stuff from The Past could be any good!

At one point, Bloom defines literature as that which is universally applicable and enjoyable. That women don't tend to find themselves especially uplifted by "The Taming Of The Shrew", or that Jews don't tend to find themselves particularly inspired by Shylock, doesn't seem to bother him. He really talks as if only W.A.S.P. males matter. What's really funny is that even Dickens (who is mentioned as a member, if not a prominent member, of the elite club) himself recognized that his own depiction of a Jew was unfair, and sought in his own lifetime to rectify this by making another Jew more likeable and heroic in a later book. Bloom, with his blank denial of the fact that, yes, the Great Works do have their moments of bigotry & misogyny, sounds to me like he's either deliberately pretending the rest of us don't exist (to appeal to his target audience: insecure snobs everywhere) or just plain dumb.

I simply don't see how anyone who thinks art "stopped" sometime in the 20th century could be viewed by anyone as an expert. Read what "experts" had to say about "trash" like Dickens, Joyce, Picasso, etc. and you see exactly what Bloom is - the sort of guy who'd file obscenity charges against today's Ulysses, because it's new and different, even as he pontificates about yesterday's Ulysses because the experts have since deemed it Worthy.

This isn't a book for people who want to learn about the Western Canon - this is a book for people who want to feel better than everyone else, the sort of pretentious idiots who buy books for how impressive they look on a shelf.

If you find yourself with two or three nights' worth of free time on your hands, spend them reading the latest book of criticism to come from the hands of Harold Bloom, The Western Canon. Not only will you be, at times, outraged by his assessments of the history of Western literature, but you will also be amazed by the author's inability to recognize those works that truly deserve a better treatment than he gives them in this work. But, that is Mr. Bloom's point in writing The Western Canon: one can argue forever about which books truly deserve to be recognized as the greatest works of literature in the Western canon and which do not. If nothing else, Mr. Bloom's book succeeds in making one think about the state of Western literature and what is involved in choosing the books that comprise the canon of Western literature. In other words, it is a must for those who take their reading seriously.

There are only a few books on the subject of an actor's resume, unfortunatly this one contains dated information and pictures of actors that are not the type in use any longer. I would suggest saving a few bucks and getting the other book (at amazon.com) that focuses on an actor's resume.