Volume 52, Number 19 · December 1, 2005
Arguing with God
By Frank Kermode
Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine
by Harold Bloom
Riverhead, 238 pp., $24.95
The Life of David
by Robert Pinsky
Schocken, 209 pp., $19.95
Jesus and Yahweh adds one more to the long list of books in which Harold Bloom demonstrates that a formidable degree of learning can coexist with exceptional boldness of imagination. His prose style is by now familiar to a largely admiring readership: it could be described as at once dogmatic and discursive, serious though on occasion whimsical, engaging but exasperating, generous but verging on the narcissistic. He means to give you the world according to Bloom, and that world is one in which Bloom cannot help being a celebrity, A scholar of extraordinary range and productivity, he speaks with confident authority, indifferent to dissent, yet usually seeming aware that even the impressive weight of his learning cannot entirely control his addiction to the fantastic and the astonishing.
Review, 4086 words
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