In an era of state-mandated standards, this book is an essential tool for teachers. Anderson et. al. show how to cut through the jargon and get down to what your students really need to learn. Finally someone has created a book that connects theory and practice, expectations and reality! This book is definitely worth reading.

I'm the type who could go on for hours about Holden and Pheobe and Ally's mitt and the girl who plays checkers and keeps the kings in the back. Everybody will obviously find their own meanings and understandings to these side reveries Holden takes us through. I just couldn't pass the opportunity to comment on the reviewers who said that Holden rambled and bored them in some ways. I wonder if these were the kids who had to read the book as assigned reading in a class they took in high school or college. I reccommend they go back.. cause I always go back to The Catcher and discover a new dawning of what Holden is trying to communicate to me. Try reading it again, it's not that big of a book you know. And maybe this time you'll see it's not really boring useless ramblings. It's a great deal more. That's the greatest part of this book.

I LOVE "Catcher in the Rye". One reason is because if you've ever been 16 or 17...you may be able to understand. Being a kid myself, I'm sick of all these unrealistic TV characters that are supposedly role models for us. Maybe I'm just strange, but virtually nothing that these kids on TV come across are things average kids encounter every day in real life. This book is timeless... Even though a lot has changed since the 1950's, kids still struggle with the same emotions and problems today. I'm sure you'll like Salinger's tale of a confused boy one summer by himself in New York City, just starting to discover the world.

To the person who said Holden "talked too much" duder .. that was the point! I'm a female in love with that book and it's like, sometimes all you do is sit some where and ramble on and on about nothing of any importance. I think THAT was what made Holden so real. He over-analyzed quite a bit, which I think a lot of self concious teens do. I don't think this book so much describes all adolescents, just like Siddhartha doesn't speak the view of every Middle Easterner. You can't write a book and say "This here story is one that every (-fill-in-space-) can identify with." I personally DO agree with a lot of things he has to say but some of my friends think he is full of s***. Anyway ... thats my review :P

This book is not objective. Bloom has an axe to grind. Not that there is intrinsically wrong in this, but....Caveat Lector. Just why Bloom developed such a deeply engrained animus to the modern age is impossible to tell and the biographies that are sure to come out in the near future (I don't consider Ravelstein a biography in any sense of the word. Saul Bellow has axes to grind too.) will be interesting reads.-The basic problem I have with the book is this: The type of deep spiritual (Romantic, with a capital R) love that Bloom regards as lost in our society has always been rare. It has been confined to those who have had a cultured upbringing combined with an inborn sensitivity and spirituality. What has happened in our demotic age is that, as Bloom perfectly puts it, "Sure, you can be a romantic today if you so choose, but it is a little like being a virgin in a whorehouse. It just doesn't fit with the temper of the times and gets no support in the current atmosphere." So what? It's still Romantic love. And our age is not alone in this temper. In more or less all ages, the vast majority of the people have regarded this type of love as, well, "silly and immature." Bloom himself admits this in the chapter on Stendhal where he states, "Stendhal appears unable to depict a fully ripe man. Successful maturity is doubtful for him, and he may in this reflect a problem with the Romantic mood altogether." The most clear passage in the book, the one that comes closest to hitting at what Bloom's all about here comes in the chapter on Anna Karenina where Bloom says,"...there is an alien impression...of a gracious, semi-aristocratic civility that is now so far away from anything we can experience or hope to experience in our daily lives. The relationships of love and friendship have a delicacy and involvement with higher concerns that almost seem inauthentic. Rather than a model for our own lives, the social scene seems to be reminiscent of a lost world where people had the leisure to attempt to make works of art of their lives." It is this "lost world" that Bloom hungers for. In other words, Bloom wants us to go back to Queen Victoria and the following Belle Epoque, when the focus of society's lens was on these priveleged few. It is curious that Bloom chooses this attack on the modern world from a book in which the heroine commits suicide by laying herself in the path of an oncoming train bacause of that society's narrow conventions.-But, please don't get me wrong. I actually LIKE this book because it focuses on the most important things in life: spiritual love and friendship. It's just that Bloom expects too much and has somehow deluded himself into thinking that there was a Golden Age when it was the norm. It has always ben rare, and I don't see why Bloom is such a sourpuss about it. One gets the feeling that some deep hurt has been done to him, and now is the time for vindication. For some reason, Bloom wants us to believe that spiritual love is extinct when it is merely out of the limelight, where it is actually more authentic. After all, the most common adjective associated with the Victorian age is "hypocritical." -But the book is interesting, erudite and worth the read. Just don't get the idea that all is lost.-That part is just Bloomean bosh.

Bloom uses the term eros broadly, to cover all forms of the longing for completion--from the love of a beautiful beloved to the love of wisdom. Ranging broadly over the history of Western literature and philosophy, he also goes deep. For each book he covers, he provides a detailed summary that effectively introduces the book to the new reader, along with commentary that illuminates the book's contribution to our ideas of love, friendship, and what they and we can be at our best. I have reservations about Bloom's treatment of Nietzsche, whom he discusses briefly here and there. But having read almost all of the books he covers in full-length chapters, I find those chapters faithful to their spirit. The section on Shakespeare has been published separately, but the others are equally good. The concluding chapters on Montaigne and Plato are especially striking in the clarity and force with which they present these authors' challenge to conventional notions about living well.

Are the folks at Kirkus really suggesting that good things necessarily last forever? Are the poor stewardship of following generations and the sad inevitable decay of all things, good and bad, entirely unimportant? In the same way that a dish of my favorite ice cream will surely melt, so will Rome fall eventually. But what does that have to do with anything? As Whit Stillman has indicated in "Metropolitan", ceasing to exist is not evidence of failure - we all cease to exist, but we are not all failures. Bloom's books (and the books of his fellow "Straussians") are, in this reader's opinion, the closest thing to clarity we have in books these days. Intelligent, elegant, romantic, penetrating. If Kirkus has a better suggestion for remedying the "contractual" nature of relationships (which IS out there - take a sympathetic look), I await it with anticipation. Bloom's commentaries on Tolstoy, Shakespeare et al are clear and free of abstraction - the antidote to the glut of theoretical (read: unerotic) drudgery that exists out there on the subject of love. Perhaps Bloom doesn't say it all, but he shows a filial loyalty to those who have come close, which is surely more than we expect nowadays.

A young man must break away from his mother and her life before he can discover a life of his own.

I skipped over Lawrence for years. I had heard the tawdry tales of his work and felt a bodice ripper is a bodice ripper no matter what century you put it in. But I was wrong! He is a marvel. As soon as I finished Sons and Lover's I went out and got The Rainbow. S & L, reads very quickly, much like Maughm's On Human Bondage. They are both of the same period and are both loosly based on the perspective authors lives. Tantilizing, they allow us a glimpse into the emerging industrial era. The middle classes and lower middle classes are emerging into the plutocracy but slowly. All around them are the dredges of a past system. The coming of age of Lawrence as he throws off his childhood and his need to throw off his mother is engrossing, since you know it is based on real life and not a campy Sally Jessy Rapahel show. He struggles as we all struggle to make the right choices. What Lawrence does is let us in on the stuff that most novels don't let the reader know. The truth the character gives to the reader is unheard of today. Read this book and follow him from childhood of a mama's boy in a coal town in Norther England that love's, and love's, and looses only to truly love .

While not as good as, say, Shakespeare's Politics or Shakespeare as a Political Thinker, this book is quite fine and analyzes a few of the plays in the Shakespeare cannon. Especially good is the analysis of Propero, Romeo & Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra. The short final chapter on Hal and Falstaff is quite interesting as well. This book makes a fine read, even if it is not as good as some of the other books on Shakespeare's deep thinking.

Chicago has published the Shakespeare part of _Love and Friendship_ separately. Not knowing the play, I had to skip the chapter on Measure for Measure, but found the interpretations of Hal and Falstaff, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Winter's Tale intriguing. They seem to me to be a little long on plot detail, particularly in the last instance, but what Bloom wrote about Ulysses, Hector, Antony, Falstaff, Mercurtio, Romeo, Friar Laurance, and Prospero is at least tenable. And he is particularly acute about Juliet, Prospero, Octavius, Achilles, and Falstaff.

I am not convinced that Shakepeare was so conscious a political theorist as Bloom supposes, systematically surveying different kinds of political communities. (That was Aristotle!). or illustrating Machiavelli (that was Leo Strauss and his students such as Bloom) Shakespeare certainly portrayed a range of human relationships, though with some more reucrrent patterns than one would guess from reading Bloom.

In particular, I think that Bloom fails to examine the generally one-way erotics of many friends disappointed by being abandoned for wedlock. There is very little representation of what happens after the weddings which are the "happy endings" for some youth, while disasters flow from established marital and quasi-marital relationships in Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Othello, and even Romeo and Juliet, including the deaths of all the title characters in these plays.

Bloom's notion that Rome's imperial expansion was over by the time Octavius defeated Antony is very peculiar. Is it that there is no great literature about Trajan than makes Bloom ignore the later imperial growth? There was no "end of politics" or shortage of enemies, internal or external, for later emperors to contend against.

As an introduction to Bloom's values and ways of thinking about canonical texts, this volume is far superior to Saul Bellow's fictionalized memoir, _Ravelstein_. _Shakespeare's Politics_ is even better an introduction.

Though not as tight as Shakespeare's Politics, this group of essay's by Bloom is the fruitful result of many years of careful study. Of particular interest is the section on Hal and Falstaff. More clearly than ever before, Bloom discusses the pleasure and ambiguity of the highest sort of friendship. Philosophy and Falstaff are congruent but not equal....they both hover just outside of the city and must remain there except in the case of friendship.

Cosimo Rucellai

The catcher in the rye is a great book teenage people should read, This book is a classic for many reasons. One important is the fact how easily people can relate to the character (Holden) in the book Holden often expresses his confusion and loneliness throughout the story, which many teens can look back on and relate. The story happens in new York city in a period of 4 days .I truly recommend this book because I loved the way Sallinger wrote it making everything so real and the way he describes everything .He makes the reader relate to the story that is what makes it so special.

I was in despepate need for help reading "The Catcher in the Rye" even though it was a good book. I read Cliffs note and I read this. Personally I thought this helped me out more.

I FOUND THE BOOK RELATEABLE TO REAL LIFE SITUTAIONS.THE LANGUAGE USED WAS INTRESTING BECAUSE MANY TEENAGERS DO SPEAK THIS WAY, AND CAN UNDERSTAND THE POINT OF VIEW HE IS COMIMG OUT WITH. THE BOOK IS VERY STRONG, THE POINTS THAT ARE BEING MADE ARE VERY HARD HITTING, IN DEPTH, AND THE MESSAGE WAS WRITTEN TO GET THE POINT STRAIGHT ACROSS. I DON'T READ BOOKS I FIND THEM TO BE BORING, I READ PORTRY AND PLAYS. BUT I FOUND THE BOOK TO BE SO INSPIRING ALSO ON TARGET WITH TODAY'S SOCIETY. I WOULD RECOMMEND IT TO ANY FRIST TIME READERS, OR PEOPLE THAT ARE LOOKING FOR EXCITMENT, COMEDEY, AND ACTION. WITH A HARD HITTING MEANING BEHIND THE BOOK THAT COINSIDES WITH REAL LIFE.

The Catcher and the Rye

The book The Catcher and the Rye by J.D. Salinger is a very interesting novel. In his unique writing style, Salinger jumps from subject to subject to subject before returning to the original topic at hand. This book basically portrays a chunk of a young man's life as he gets kicked out of a private high school called Pencey. He slowly leaves campus for home without trying to be too depressed. Holden Caulfield, as the character is named, is set in his way of thinking and its very abstract at that. The book takes you on these small adventures and you can tell that they are exaggerated. He thinks about things too much, and his mind is especially stuck on women. He doesn't like his parents much but has three siblings that he gets along with. He's always reminiscing things he's done or people he used to know, again particularly the females. He doesn't consider himself smart but he sure talks like he does. I know he's not preaching, he's just talking to people who care to listen. I liked the book to start, but it got old pretty fast.

I suppose before writing this review I have to remind myself not to use the word grand...Anyway, Catcher in the Rye is an excellent book. Period. That is, if you simply look at Salinger's skillful treatment of pacing, dialogue, and characterization. Teenagers though, will see much more. Salinger writes an incredibly believable Holden Caulfield, who has since become the posterboy for adolescent angst. Either Catcher is Salinger's quasi-autobiography or he's "the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life." The book is not astonishing for its moral, but for its lack of one (too phony for Holden, and would've undermined the reader's genuine connection to him). Its just this young guy looking for innocence, for honest emotion. Catcher in the Rye isn't a collection of empty platitudes and universal philosophy. Its a breath of fresh air that will leave you more in touch with yourself and a little better for having read it. All in all, it was a phenomenal book and one I hope you will add to your personal library.

I am not an avid reader, nor am I one who enjoys the burdensome task of slaving through a book for English class. I do read a lot (because I have to), and so far J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is by far the best book I've ever read. In writing this book, Salinger surpassed Hemmingway, Hawthorne, and all the other "great writers."

Catcher is the story of Holden Caulfield, a selfish, hypocritical, and troubled teenager who has been kicked out of a private high school just before Christmas vacation. Like any teenager, he isn't eager to tell his parents that he's been kicked out of school, so he leaves his dorm and wanders around New York trying to find himself. The book follows Holden and his encounters in the Big Apple. He drinks in bars, solicits a prostitute, and does many other things that some boys at that age often think about, but lack the means and the cajones to actually do. Holden is troubled about the fact that he is growing up. He does not want to become older and sees his maturation as a transition from the real and personal world of being young to the phony, impersonal word of the older generation.

I enjoyed this novel because Salinger amazingly writes the dialogue of Holden to resemble that a real immature pre-adult. He also did not shy away from including profanity and risqué subject matter. Salinger also writes in a style which, as I have noticed over the past couple years, many of the great American novelists lack. It's called PLAIN ENGLISH. There is not any complicated dialogue, confusing metaphors, or any hidden meaning. When Salinger has a message, he says it straight out. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye is a well written novel.

Any living, breathing, human with at least half a pulse would enjoy this novel at least for the story itself. However, if you are a guy around sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen you should definitely grab a copy of this book and get to reading. Trust me you wont be sorry. Salinger has also written some short stories like "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." I haven't read those stories yet, but if they contain only half the literary perfection found in The Catcher in the Rye, then they're definitely worth looking into.

Now, I don't pretend to be a scholar, let alone a biblicalscholar. And I can not say that I am particularly religious, but Ihave found "The Book of J" to be particularly fresh and intriguing.

I have read Tanakh, the Jewish Publication Society's 1985 translation of the Torah, and have dipped into both its earlier 1917 version and the King James version. I have fought my way through Jonathon Kirsch's "Moses, A Life" and have delighted in reading and rereading Thomas Cahill's "The Gifts of the Jews"; and while I have enjoyed them, I've never really thought about the authors of the Old Testament. But David Rosenberg's translation of J's work, and Harold Bloom's wonderful commentary have brought a new sense of wonder towards my reading of these sacred works and has made them fresh and new to me.

I look forward to furthering my own study into my religion and my spirituality and would recommend highly to anybody who is interested in reviving their interest in the Torah to read "The Book of J" and take a new look at an old text.

Harold Bloom's 'The Book of J' caused quite a stir when it first was published. The book contains both introductory essays on authorship, a discussion of the theory of different texts being used to make up the books of the Bible (the Documentary Hypothesis), some historical context, and translation notes.

The bulk of the book consists of David Rosenberg's new translation of the J text, that text having been separated and isolated from the other source texts of the Torah (first five books of the Bible).

The concluding section contains essays by Bloom on different characters and themes in the text, as well as some modern theoretical analysis of the text, isolated as it is in this volume from the greater mass of material in the Bible.

There is a brief appendix by Rosenberg with notes specifically geared toward translation issues and difficulties, as well as source materials.

First, for a little background: since the 1800's, much of Biblical textual scholarship and analysis has subscribed to the theory that most books were not first written as integrated wholes, but rather, consist of a library of amalgamated texts, largely put together by a person who goes by the title Redactor, or R, for short. This was (in terms of Hebrew Bible timelines) a relatively late occurrence. Prior to this, there were various sources, including the J (J for Jehovah, or Yahweh, which is what God is called in these texts), but also E (Elohist, which is what God is called in these texts), P (Priestly, which largely comprises Leviticus), and D (Deuteronomist). The separation of these strands is controversial, and will probably never cease to be. But with literary and linguistic analysis, certain traits can be discerned of each of the particular strands.

The most controversial conclusion which Bloom advances in this volume is that J is a woman, who lived in the courtly community of King David, and that her stories are not only a retelling of the ancient stories which would have been known commonly, but is also a satire and indictment of courtly life as she finds it.

'J was no theologian, and rather deliberately not a historian.... There is always another side of J: uncanny, tricky, sublime, ironic, a visionary of incommensurates, and so the direct ancestor of Kafka, and of any writer, Jewish or Gentile, condemned to work in Kafka's mode.'

Bloom's assertion that J is a woman consists of several 'telling' ideas, not least of which that the J text seems to have no heroes, only heroines.

'Sarai and Rachel are wholly admirable, and Tamar, in proportion to the narrative space she occupies, is very much the most vivid portrait in J. But Abram, Jacob, and Moses receive a remarkably mixed treatment from J.'

Also, on the basis of sensitivity to subject and social vision, Bloom argues for a female J. Of course, women in positions of authority (as any courtly author or historian would have to be) were very rare in ancient Middle Eastern culture, but not unheard of; of course, literacy rates for women were incredibly low, and there has always been the unspoken assumption that, naturally, the authors of all ancient texts are men.

Whether or not you subscribe to this (and I must confess, I am less than convinced, clever and interesting and thought-provoking as Bloom's essay may be), both on the person of the author of J, as well as many of his other equally unorthodox views, this text still provides much food for thought, and an interesting side text with which to read the accounts in Genesis and Exodus.

Reading Rosenberg's translation is, likewise, an interesting exercise. I would wish for footnote or some key to be able to follow along in the Bible, but Rosenberg's purpose was to let J stand as its own text, on its own merits, and thus, without interruption, he has done that here. A refreshing look at familiar texts, Rosenberg's new translation will give things to think and argue about for some time.

Irreverent, profound, and deeply disturbing, this (putative) Book of J will change one's view of the Tanakh and the Old Testament for good; For that alone David Rosenberg is to be commended, given how hard it is to approach the Bible afresh-- the weight of history, in the form of the King James Version (and others)has other ideas. Rosenberg's J is deeply ironic, and inclined to view YHWH and reader alike with bemusement: a symmetry that seems to me to be the source of much of the text's charisma. Bloom is, as always, a powerful(if perhaps overly-rhapsodic) commentator, and this is Yale's Grand Old Man at his rhetorical best (before the repetitive bug bit him in the Western Canon and Shakespeare: Invention of the Human). Some have complained about the wildly speculative nature of his theory: I can only conclude that they have missed the point; whether or not "J" really was Bathsheba (a hypothesis Bloom adopted subsequent to the book's publication) the flight of fancy whereby one identifies the two (or indeed even "reconstructs" the Book of J itself) is the best way to honor the imagined "Yahwist" author.

I could relate to about 1/10th of the poems. My instinct (late from the moldering glades of the academy) is that these poems were chosen to broaden (not deepen) the moat around the ivory tower -- poetry IS dead in this volume, mostly.

Here in Australia, where I've been living for twenty years as a teacher, I'd lost contact with American poetry. I happened on the Poetry Daily web site and dived in. And found, I could order books through Amazon which I'd never seen. I now have two shelves of much read poetry and more in containers on slow ships on their way. I remember the pleasure I got from reading the commentaries and the poems in the Best...of 1997. So when I saw the Best of the Best (Harold Bloom's ed) I picked it up here, even though it was very expensive. While I enjoyed most of the poems, I found his introduction surprising. What a grump!

I'm pro-Bloom in the general political/aesthetic sense, and it was satisfying for me to see him crystalize some of my sentiments in his foreword. But I bought the book for the poetry, and (judging from the other Best... books I own) I'm of the opinion that Bloom did a mediocre job as editor. His options were, thankfully, limited to a set comprised mostly of strong poems. This book could probably have survived the abuses of a monkey-throwing-darts-at-a-list-of-options editor.

There are a lot of poems in here but you look far and wide for something really good. I mean, sure, there are the people we already knew were good -- C.K. Williams, Eavan Boland, Frank O'Hara and et cetera et cetera -- but with a book this big you want a few surprises, you want to find some new stuff you didn't know about before. And for me, that didn't really happen. Philip Larkin's "Aubade" is maybe the best poem here -- and maybe the best poem about death ever written -- though what it's doing in a book of AMERICAN poetry I can't figure out (I guess it was just too good to exclude). They put Seamus Heaney in, too, which makes me wonder why they left out Paul Muldoon -- he's been living in New Jersey for years now, and writes poems as good as anything in here (and better than 99% of it). Go to your local bookstore and look through this monster -- maybe you'll have better luck than me, and find something thrilling -- but don't buy it.