This collection puts at your fingertips,a great reference guide to find out exactly what the Holy Fathers said about important issues concerning the church, it's doctrines, moral teachings, and social views of their time. A must-have for catholic scholars and anyone wishing to learn more about the many encyclicals which have shaped the Catholic Church and all of society

Moshe Halbertal, professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University, relates the following tale about heaven and hell in his Introduction to "People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority": "Don't think that hell is where people are consumed by fire for their sins or that heaven is where they are rewarded with pleasures for their piety. What really happens is that God gathers everybody in one large hall. Then He gives them the Talmud and commands them to start studying. For the wicked, studying Talmud is hell. For the pious, it's heaven."

Halbertal's tale amusingly illustrates the importance that sacred texts play in Judaism and provides a fitting entrée into this short, but fascinating, exploration of the development and importance of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud as canonical works of the Jewish community.

Halbertal begins with a short introduction adumbrating the meaning of a "canonical" text and its various guises. The adjective, of course, refers to a text's special status in a community. The special status of a canon can be "normative" (it is obeyed and followed as the law of a community), "formative" (it is a curriculum that is taught, read, transmitted, and interpreted) or "exemplary" (it is a paradigm for aesthetic value and achievement). For example, the Talmud is both a normative and a formative canon of the traditional Jewish community; normative in the sense that it establishes appropriate behavior in many aspects of life, formative in the sense that it is a fundamental text that is the object of endless interpretation and debate and, in some cases, the intellectual sine qua non of membership in the community.

From this brief introduction, "People of the Book" then explores, in successive chapters (which mirror the chronological development of each successive text), the canonization of the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud and what the ascendancy of each of these texts meant for the formation of authority and meaning in the Jewish community. He also explores the challenges that philosophy and Kabbalah posed to the Talmudic canon in the Middle Ages and closes with a short appendix discussing how Hobbes and Spinoza appropriated and interpreted the canonical text of the Hebrew Bible in their political philosophy.

In less than one hundred fifty pages (excluding the extensive footnotes), Moshe Halbertal has written a challenging and thoughtful exploration of the development of the canonical works of Judaism and how those canonical works shaped authority and meaning in the community and between the community and the non-Jewish world. "People of the Book" is a concise, but intellectually rich, exegesis of the key texts of Judaism and how those texts shaped Jewish thought through the ages.

I've never read the Old testament really, except for samll fragments here and there. These volumes provide a way into these ancient texts, and the short intro by contemporary writers give a soft entry into what is usually very dense matter. -
A few minor complaints. I would rather hear what Pasolini or CS Lewis said about a canon than some of the writers picked. Also, the books are cheaply made. The overall design of the package is very clever and innovative, but I would prefer it was twice the price for books that were a little more substantial.

Well, a good guidebook isn't glamorous, and certainly not a literary work. All it should do is tell you about all the routes, and give you good directions to get there. This one does it. And that's quite a challenge, since there are around 500 routes.

A *great* guidebook goes out of its way, with lots of photos to keep you from getting lost. It would also give lots of information about local accomodations and other stuff. This book falls a bit short, but it is still good. And quite frankly, there are no other options that are as up-to-date as this one. The access fund recently purchased land containing 100-200 routes, which I understand that previous guidebooks did not review.

iv just finished reading this book as part of my ou literature course,if you want an easy read go elsewhere, however if your pretty inteligent and you really want to learn about shakespeare and aprha behn then this is the right book.
beware reading this could change your life.

the book is pretty good and goes in depth on the features and functions of the G3. The onl problem is that the disk that comes with it is BLANK. I have emailed the author and had no response so far.

This is a hightly readable little book. While scholarly in its approach, it does not scare off the causal reader with an overabundance of footnotes, cross-references and untranslated original language quoatations. Rather, Professor Sanders takes the reader through from the definition of Torah to his final paragraph: "For Judaism Torah becam the living Talmud; for Christianity Torah became the living Christ . . . And Torah, in that basic sense, is the single foundation of both church and synagogue, two denominations in one Israel of God (Gal. 6:15)." The author's passion for his material is evident in his style of writing and carries the reader quickly through an overview of the Hebrew scriptures.

"This treatise shows the apostolic fruition of ecclesiastical discipline and order germinating from the otherwise out-moded admonishments of the Apostle Paul's Pastoral Epistles to Timothy."

This is the first, and to date the only, book that attempts to tell the 19th century legal history of the Mormon Church. The book is divided into three parts. The first section basically gives the legal history of the church during the life time of its founder Joseph Smith. The second section details the intensive persecution of the church by the federal government over the practice of plural marriage. The third section describes in detail the ecclesiastical court system that basically served all of the judicial needs of pioneer Mormons. This section in particular is fabulous. Firmage and Mangrum had incredible access to confidential church court records and the detail and scope of their treatment dwarfs any other work on the subject.

However the book is not without flaws. There are some gaps in the research. For example, the landmark Reynolds decision is dicussed in detail, but one gets the impression that the only documents consulted were the published legal ones (opinions and briefs). What about journals and letters by the participants? These sorts of gaps abound.

On the whole, however, this is a wonderful work. Law is one of the hitherto neglected regions of Mormon studies, and Mormon perspectives are among the hitherto neglected possibilities of legal studies. Despite a facinating legal history, Mormon historians have done compartively little on the subject. Likewise, despite Mormons at the highest levels of the legal establishment -- e.g., Rex E. Lee (Solicitor General) or Dallin H. Oaks (Dean of Chicago Law School) -- there have been compartatively few attempts at sustained and scholarly Mormon perspectives on the law. Anyone interested in providing such perspectives should read this book.

There is nothing better than a good book discussion. Everyone who takes reading seriously has ideas on what the best and most important books are. Certainly Harold Bloom is a serious reader and in this book he offers us his insights into some of the highlights of the past 500 years in Western literature. Even so, in 500 pages he is able to give us only about 25 authors. Fortunately, he also gives us a number of appendices listing many others.

At the head of Bloom's "western canon" is, not surprisingly, William Shakespeare. In fact, I would probably agree with Bloom on the basic fact of Shakespeare's importance to Western literature; however, if there is a weakness in Bloom's book, it his constant references to Shakespeare throughout the book. I admire Shakespeare as probably the single greatest dramatist in English but I do not think everything written since is simply a homage or reaction to Shakespeare. Shakespeare changed all of literature after him but he had his sources. Shakespeare was a source for writers after him but Cervantes, Montaigne, Whitman, Kafka and others altered our literature in ways that have no relationship to Shakespeare.

I also have trouble with the idea that Falstaff is the most important Shakespearean character or that King Lear is the most important play. When Bloom focuses on these ideas he reveals his prejudices. He also reveals himself as an old man. We all relate most closely to those characters in which we can see our reflection. I somehow doubt that Falstaff was Bloom's favorite when he was in his twenties.

Still, despite his obsession with Shakespeare, Bloom's intellect and experience range wide. He has a number of wonderful insights into the various authors he discusses and I admire his belief in the importance of literature. It is a belief that I share. Additionally, I enjoy Bloom's digs at feminist, Marxist and Freudian criticism. Though I feel they have made some important contributions to literary criticism, I would agree with Bloom's assertions concerning the damage they have done as well. I agree strongly with the idea that a book must earn a place in the canon by its brilliance and originality; not simply because it was written by a woman or a minority.

But, ultimately, we need not worry too much about the canon, I think. Books are suffering these days, it is true, but reading will never become obsolete and so literature will survive. And the canon will constantly reinvent itself as books are rediscovered and authors go in and out of vogue. (Even Shakespeare's popularity waxes and wanes.) Still, whether in a peak of popularity or a trough, some authors and their works will always be read and studied and this is how an author makes it to the canon. It is not a position granted by literature professors, no matter how much they wish it might be so. But it's nice to have professor's like Bloom to keep us talking about it.

Bloom adopted Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history for organization of the western canon. Vico proposed that history is divided into three ages: an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men followed by a chaos out of which a new historical cycle will begin. After his introductory Elegy for the Canon, Bloom skips the Theocratic Age, proceeding to the Aristocratic Age, the Democratic Age, the Chaotic Age, and his Elegiac Conclusion. Each age has 6-8 chapters, each chapter devoted to an author or group of authors. The authors are, in order: Aristocratic: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Samuel Johnson, and Goethe; Democratic: Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Ibsen; Chaotic: Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa, and Beckett.

He begins with Shakespeare whom he calls the center of the canon. Bloom exalts Shakespeare almost to a godlike state in his aesthetic zeal. In fact, every other author in the book is related to Shakespeare in some way. For example, Chaucer's Pardoner, he says, was a prototype for Shakespeare's Iago and Edmund. Tolstoy, he says, could not handle the influence of Shakespeare in his works so much so that he had to disavow him in his essay What is art?. The reason Freud believed Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford is that he could not himself reckon with Shakespeare's greatness and Freud's reading of Shakespeare was really Shakespeare's reading of life.

Bloom can appear at times a little too radical in some of his statements. For example he claims that the Jesus of the American religion is not the true Jesus of Nazareth, of the Crucifixion, or of heaven but only the Jesus of the Resurrection. He says that the Jesus Christians worship is a literary figure created by the writer of the Gospel of Mark. He exalts the search for aesthetic greatness above all else in canonical works, even dismissing morality in them past the point of serving its aesthetic purpose. But he can be forgiven some of his university gobbledygook.

The real thesis of the book is that the feminists, Marxists, new historicists, deconstructonists, Freudians, and other ideologues that are taking over the universities are wrong that the western canon, just because it is made up of a bunch of dead white males, is outdated. He defends the western canon very effectively, especially against adding period authors just because of their ethnicity or gender. He argues for the aesthetic merit and place in the canon of each of the authors he covers in the chapters eloquently and justly. I dare anyone who reads this review to read this book and you will be converted, too.

Harold Bloom has been, arguably, the world's best reader, the most wide-ranging and the most retentive. Some people believe his book, The Western Canon, verges on the audacious since Bloom dares to list what Western literary works are canonical as well as what ones will be.

While the appendices, with their lists of books, are the section of The Western Canon that provokes the most argument, these take up relatively few of the book's 578 pages. Bloom begins with a "Preface and Prelude," then indicates the mood the book will assume in "An Elegy for the Canon." Adopting Giambattista Vico's theory of history, Bloom then goes on to discuss twenty-six writers from different ages of literature. From the Aristocratic Age: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, Milton, Johnson and Goethe; from the Democratic Age: Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy and Ibsen; and from the Chaotic Age: Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. Just before the appendices is the "Elegiac Conclusion," in which Bloom says he has "very little confidence that literary education will survive its current malaise," but he hopes that there will be "literate survivors."

Early in the book, Bloom tells us that he is not interested in the debate among those want to preserve the Western canon and those who want to destroy it. Instead, Bloom is interested only in literary aesthetics and he claims that canonicity comes "only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction." Bloom believes in the existence of canons, he says, because the very brevity of life prevents us from reading more than a fraction of the literature created by various authors throughout the centuries.

The Western Canon is more than an interesting book; it is also very thought-provoking. Some of the questions raised include: Is canonicity always the result of one writer's triumph over a great literary ancestor? Do not canons, to some degree, depend on the choices of the wealthy as well as on chance, luck or other devices of caprice? Does Bloom put too much emphasis on cognitive difficulty, choosing books that few readers outside of universities would ever want to read, much less reread? Then there is the excessive praise of Shakespeare as the entire center of the Western Canon. Is this perceptive criticism or does it cross the line into idolatry?

There are those who believe Bloom is too quick to dismiss the moral value of literature. Shelley, they say, went too far in his Defence of Poetry in praising great literature for enlarging a reader's imagination and thus leading to moral improvement. But Bloom, say the same critics, fails to go far enough in acknowledging the moral implications inherent in all great literature.

The greatest arguments, however, are reserved for the lists at the end of the book. How could Bloom leave out this author and include that? Why is this book included and that one is not? But even the critics have to praise Bloom for the breadth of his lists; his idea of the Western canon includes authors from the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Asia, Africa, the West Indies and South America. Bloom even notes The Mahabharata and the Ramayana and says that "ignorance of the Koran is foolish and increasingly dangerous." Bloom has also included English-language works by writers whom one would not necessarily think of as Western, for example: R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Another source of controversy has been the (almost) exclusion of female authors. Bloom does mention Alice Walker even before he gets to his lists, but he refuses to say anything good about her. Regarding the works of Toni Morrison, Bloom sees fit to include only Song of Solomon in the canon. He omits all works by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Ayn Rand, Bobbie Ann Mason and Pearl Buck. To be fair, Bloom leaves out a number of male authors as well, authors whom one would have assumed would have been included such as John Gardner, John Updike (represented only by The Witches of Eastwick) and Arthur Miller (represented only by Death of a Salesman).

Although some have accused Bloom of composing a canon made up of Dead White European Males, he does include several American authors in his lists as well as devoting half chapters to Jane Austen and George Eliot and full chapters to Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf, all of whom he praises lavishly.

The Western Canon will never be beyond argument and debate, that is simply an impossibility. People will always disagree with Bloom on one point or another. In the final analysis, Bloom, this century's greatest reader, has treated an enormously important topic with tremendous expertise. And, although an eccentric par excellence, Bloom has definitely compiled astute reading suggestions and critical opinions that certainly deserve anyone's careful consideration.