Volume 47, Number 9 · May 25, 2000
Bloom's Gift
By Louis Menand
Ravelstein
by Saul Bellow
Viking, 233 pp., $24.95
Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom were friends. They taught together at the University of Chicago, and Bellow wrote the foreword to Bloom's phenomenal best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, which came out in 1987. In spite of its popularity, The Closing of the American Mind was a quirky book. Many writers tried to imitate its success as a diatribe against American higher education, but very few tried to repeat its argument. For in many ways the book was a kind of personal fantasy—a contrarian reading of a handful of old philosophy texts offered as the explanation for the 'relativism' of today's professors and the soullessness of today's youth, a condition whose supreme expression, in Bloom's view, was rock music: 'a muddy stream where only monsters can swim.'[1]
Review, 2299 words
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