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.

It was a pretty good book. It made me realize what life was like back in dickens' time. The industrial revolution was going on... It started off pretty slow than got exciting as I read on. I encourage young readers to think about reading this book.

Hard Times depicts the lives of ordinary people during the industrial revolution in England. Dickens brings several characters to life and weaves an interesting story about their interactions with each other. Most of these characters are poor and they live in a pollution ridden town where the economy is based on coal production. Dickens's description of their lives is excellent. The only reason for the four stars is that one or two secret matters are alluded to near the beginning, but they are never revealed, leaving the reader a little disappointed. Overall, Hard Times is very good book.

Hard times lyrically explains life in the early 1800's while captivating its readers and showing that hard times hits people of all eras, decades, and even surpasses those of 1800's to the 1990's. However, what is most intriguing is the fact that Charles Dickens in some aspects suggest that sometimes hard times are circumstances that we subject ourselves and others to and whether is under ones own volition or under false pretenses. Hard Times is indeed a knowledgeable novel that teaches a lesson and shows one of many Dickens attributes. This review is from Merci McKinley who is 16 years old from Potomac High School in Oxon Hill, Maryland.

This book contains a lot of symbollism that advanced readers can comprehend. The ending is what ties the book together and has a lot of meaning to it. Heidi and Jessica

i think a lot of the people reviewing this book have missed the point. It is true that there is not much of a plot but the book is not about plot. If you want a page turner go to an airport and look at the bestseller list. Through this book Hemingway displays his views and feelings on masculinity. It has been said, and been well reported, that Hemingway is deeply macho and believes in this whole rum-drinking world. But in the old man... I feel that Hemingway shows a masculinity with a human face. In the book the old man and the boy talk of the baseball greats. When they come to John J. McGraw, they say that "he was rough and harsh-spoken and difficult when he was drinking." Here Hemingway is showing that machismo which is coarse or totally insensitive is not a worthy charectaristic. Although Dimaggio is strong and plays through a bone spur and the old man is resolute in over coming every difficulty to kil the Marlin, both these charectors are give a sensitive edge. The old man talks about humility and wonders about the consequences of having this emotion. He decides that this feeling loses no pride. Ultimately I feel that feelings and the fight that man has to go through are the over whelming messages of the book.

The old man... also has beautiful images and throws up lots of questions aboutrole models and determination. I read in one of the reviews that the reviewer wanted snatiago to let the fish go and go back to land! That is totally missing the point. We have to look at santiago and his qualities. Take the arm wrestle he didn't just 'give-up'. All of us can do with some of his determination to be resloute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory.

All in all i feel this is a fantasti book that uses some wonderful images. the language, which has caused such a chasm between the reviewers, I feel is beautiful. It is so beautifully simple that hemingway himself considered it the best he had ever and would ever write.

I would like to recommend One hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcia marquez, graham greene, a confedaracy of dunces by john kennedy toole

The Old Man and the Sea was an outstanding book in my opinion. Although short, it had some deeper meaning. One theme I found was: have courage in the face of defeat. Even though the Old man hadn't caught a fish in 72 days he kept trying. The next day geuss what, he caught a huge marlin. He fought with the fish for three days before he killed it. On the way back he had more than just worrying about keeping the fish tied to the boat. I don't want to spoil the ending but I do recommend reading it.

AS A GRADE 11 STUDENT, I AM EXPECTED TO MOAN AND COMPLAIN ABOUT A SEEMINGLY LONG AND BORING NOVEL THAT I AM REQUIRED TO READ IN MY ENGLISH CLASS.... INSTEAD, I FOUND THAT THIS NOVEL WAS THE FIRST THAT DARED TO REALLY DIG DEEP DOWN INTO THE MORAL AND ETHICAL VALUES OF HUMEN BEINGS. THIS NOVEL REVEALS THE TRUTH ABOUT THE STRONG, THE WEAK, THE RICH, THE POOR, AND THOSE WHO ARE FALSE, AND THOSE WHO ARE TRUE. I BELIEVE THAT THIS NOVEL IS AN INVESTMENT OF TIME THAT EVERYONE SHOULD LOOK INTO... IT'S WELL WORTH IT!!!

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, is a great story for just about anyone who has the time. From Pip's thoughts and fears, to his hopes and desires, the reader is left waiting for the outcome. This novel is a good-read, but it takes awhile to get involved. Be patient; the wait is most definitely worth the while. Charles Dickens manages to wholly fulfill the title, which is a major theme throughout the book. Enjoy!

Bloom is the editor of this book of essays concerning the poetry of John Milton. Students or casual readers of the book will both profit from and enjoy them. Milton was a great poet,and should be understood on his on ground, on his on terms, and the essays will facilitate such understanding.

Please do read Abdiel Agonistes review, but keep in mind that his view is biased by his religious beliefs; and his misconceptions of great poets such as Whitman and Goethe as well as his scurrilous (and discredited) view of Modernism should be taken with a grain of salt.

John Milton's reputation has unjustly suffered a diminution during the last two centuries. The romantics, repulsed by his religious theme of the earthly pilgrimage of the soul, corrupted his poem by maliciously interpreting Satan as the hero, despite Milton's unequivocal condemnation of Satan and his equally lucid characterization of the repentant Adam as the true hero. T.S. Eliot and those who ape his opinions also find Milton the man and his religious beliefs repellent. The poets of the modern era deride Milton because, in general, they have abandoned religious belief and turned to vague forms of idealism, as in Whitman's Democratic Vistas, and to the creation of idiosyncratic ersatzes, as in Poe's Eureka. John Keats's Endymion and the Hyperion poems fail as much because of their superficial content as their poor structure and execution. In Auden's analysis, "the modern problem" hamstrings the romantics as much as Yeats or Pound. Milton never suffered from such a malady and hence the envious detestation he has received from minor poets who are unquestionably his inferiors. Milton possesses a serious vision of history and humankind that could only achieve full expression in the most demanding form of poetry--the epic. But most poets of the last few hundred years have not found themselves entrusted with such a vision. Much to the contrary, they excel in every imaginable type of turpitude and triviality that the human mind is capable of producing. Like Yeats they have often thrown together every decadent principle or superstition that has ever happened along. This sorry state of affairs has become so common in postmodern poetry that anyone who would attempt to restore epopee to its glorious heights of noble seriousness and serenity would find ranked against him every academic hack and, as Milton phrased it, every "libidinous and ignorant" poetaster who has "scarce ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem."

Milton knew the "consistence of a true poem," and both Paradise Lost and many passages scattered throughout his prose attest to it. In The Reason of Church Government he surveys the abilities of such masters as Homer, Virgil, Job, and Sophocles. Along with the modern loss of belief in God has gone his high and serious belief in the office of the poet. Equally banished from the modern conception of poetry is all respect for positive values, morals, and virtues. The story of twentieth-century literature is the abuse and misguided replacement of such healthy standards with the perversions of modernism and postmodernism. In brief, "the modern problem."

Unlike in the work of Jacques Derrida and his academic flies, the "presence" of God is a reality for Milton. Here in the abstract Milton gives us what throughout Paradise Lost he has been dramatizing--the "principles and presuppositions" to which Adam, representative man, must obediently submit, not merely in Eden, but for the fulfillment of his life during his journey on the earthly plane. In Satan, Milton presents the picture of the rebel, almost a type of the Renaissance hero Benvenuto Cellini, who through pride usurps power and whose fundamental actions and motives have their most appropriate modern analogue, as many have observed, in the archvillains Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Such men fully embody the will to power that the nihilist Nietzsche, as Thomas Mann put it, glorified. Such totalitarian dictators were the inevitable product of the romantic fascination with Satan, as though he were a hero and not an arrogant aspirant after power. Such cultural confusion reveals itself in Goethe's Faust as well as in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Such errors in judgment, such fundamental confusion of values, mark the modern era and set it off from the spiritually healthier times of Dante, Langland, Spenser, and Milton--healthier only in terms of possessing to a degree a unified spiritual vision that provided universal standards with which to confront the damnable deeds of their day. Far from the banal optimism of the modern era, as in Whitman, they know that the long hard way of man is through suffering and turmoil and that the assurance Michael gives Adam about future generations abides eternally: "Doubt not but that sin / Will reign among them." Despite Freud's "freeing" man from sin, the twentieth century proved to be the most sinful in history, precisely because the unique spiritual reality of each soul and its fundamental limitations were denied. The violent, arrogant, insidious deeds of the archvillains of modern political nihilism alone account for the suffering and deaths of hundreds of millions of people, while much of the so-called intelligentsia of the West and East defended or prepared the way for the slaughter. Whereas Virgil denounced war except as the last resort for establishing peace, modern poets have often ignored the inhumanities of our century--save for those like Pound whose totalitarianism abetted the brutalizing of millions of innocents and the early Auden who approved "the necessary murder." Here at the end of the twentieth century when humankind still stands technologically capable of destroying much of the vast expanse of the globe and much, though not all, of its population, here when a more trustworthy political form has yet to be securely established to channel the will of the citizens of the international community, epopee must again take account of the social domain and man's earthly journey through these immense atrocities. For by faithfully treading the dark way of horror, by weighing the modern loss of belief, humankind may begin to regain the path in the twenty-first century, and, like Dante's persona, attain the highest summit of peace and glory.

A digest of literary reviews, mostly dragged down (like the lover in Un Chien Andalou) by a more or less preponderating weight of tenth-rate pseudo-academic jibber-jabber, but there is much useful information, and the essays by Northrop Frye and D.H. Lawrence are invaluable.

I enjoyed the book, but then again I'm already a faithful fan of McCullers and used the book mainly as background information for a research paper. There were several points and concepts Bloom brought up that I had never put together, which was very helpful. I thought the book was helpful and informative, and a good general overview for the casual reader.

Well, I am a 17 year old high schooler, and I just read "The Age of Innocence", I don't think people of my age should be reading this kind of books, most of my people in my English class didn't understand like half of the vocabulary, I personally didnt understand some of it. I wouldn't recommend this book to any young people, it involves lots of imaginary love scenes that I dont think people in my age understand.

Unreadable. This endless poem is so stuck in the "old time religion" that it is totally irrelvant to modern readers.

I was confused by other people's reviews on this book and I'm sure other people have been as well. This is NOT John Milton's epic, but actually a collection of historical criticisms on this work. I ordered this book by accident, basing my decision on other people's comments, but luckily I was glad about what I found. So if you want a perspective of famous views on Paradise Lost, buy this book. But if you want to buy John Milton's classic (which I would recommend as well), buy another book.

This is arguably the single best work ever written in the English language -- or in any language. Milton sets out to 'justify the ways of God to man' - could there be a bigger task? And comes darn close. The story of God and Satan, Adam and Eve, Paradise Lost is the epic of mankind. Written in blank verse, it is thick and a bit tough to get through at first -- but as with all things, perseverance pays off and soon you'll be loving the verse.

Don't just read it once, though. This is one of those books that is better studied than read -- and there are lots of things you'll get the second, third, fourth time through that you won't the first.

Everyone should read this. That'd be a step toward Utopia.

And yes, I am Generation X.

This book (and the previous review) seems to typify just how far Nietzsche has penetrated into academe and what strange poses he is being forced to take. When Bloom states that "the language...of criticism ought to be pragmatic and outrageous..."(p.19) we wonder if he is really aware of the contradiction in such a viewpoint. For, as the high priest of pragmatism, William James, frequently stated "pragmatism [is] a mediator and reconciler..."(Pragmatism Chapt. 1). Pragmatism, in other words, is an elaborate justification of conformity. It may not be pragmatic at some time to epater le bourgeoise and it is certainly not outrageous to mediate or reconcile. The Yale professor is trying to square the circle. This paradox runs through the work as, on another occasion, we're told that "it [ie. the work in question] cannot become the American religion until it first is canonized as American literature" (p.150). Jeremiah must become a literature professor at Yale, it would seem. Bloom's (and our ecstatic reviewer's) blindness to this problem is difficult to account for.

Returning to our opening claim, Bloom's desire to outrage is rooted in his admiration of Nietzsche's glorification of the poetic soul freely creating worlds ex nihilo. We point out in-passing that his avowed opponents, the franco-heideggerian deconstructionists, also trace their roots to this philosopher. What we appear to be reading is an academic quarrel among tenured radicals who are trying to figure out whether they must eat the little end or the big end of the egg first. For Bloom, "the true ship is the shipbuilder" and "right reading is not reading well" (p.20). Rather than creating worlds ala Nietzsche, Bloom believes in creating interpretations. When we read and interpret we produce a text which is itself a "misreading" of the text we are attempting to read. Misunderstanding is more important than comprehension and the job of the critic is to provoke, rather than to explain. [In this respect he is in union with his academic "targets."] The sad fact here is, however, that there is no way to determine a sound from an unsound reading, an accurate one from a child's scrawlings on a napkin (p.16). This is the night in which all cows are black and Nietzsche's philosopher suffers from the same incoherence, only he attempts to seek refuge in the classification of interpretations as "noble" and "base." Since noble and base are judgments made by others, they are as arbitrary as the creations they purport to laud or condemn. No one has yet successfully unified James and Nietzsche; convention and radicalism.

If we pay attention to the attempts at "criticism" in the work we are thoroughly disheartened to discover that Bloom has chosen to ignore the obvious in favor of the ridiculous. While dismissing the blatant Hegelianism of Emerson, he prefers to run him through the Freudian meat grinder in an attempt to reclaim the Concord sage as 100% American. The silliness of such an activity should be self-explanatory. Bloom, of course, would not object to this characterization since "misreading" is more important than understanding (p.16). It is odd that he expresses such faith that his critics will, one day, understand him. "Upon what evidence do you make such a claim," we ask. Again, the longing for public acceptance overrides the desire to be "outrageous." On a more serious note, the need for Bloom to marshall the various and oppositional forces of gnosticism, kabbala, psychoanalysis and pragmatism bespeaks a reader's sensibility which is fundamentally impoverished. His heroes, Johnson, Empson, Wilde, and Pater felt no need to adopt an alien method or religion because they saw themselves as reconnecting with the work and brushing away the sediment of dull, received opinion. Kabbalah and gnosticism insist that God is "x" but pragmatism believes that it only matters if we act upon it and psychoanalysis tells us that the whole thing is just a defense mechanism to deal with the difficulties of living. Why the Yale professor chose to ignore this obvious incompatibility is deeply troubling for it speaks volumes about the quality of scholarship in our most elite universities.

While Professor Bloom provides us with many ideas he seems to have mistaken the David for a junk pile at a flea market; careful exposition for cocktail-party twaddle. The major "thesis" of the work, called "revisionism," is that all poetry (meaning those poems which the author cites within the work) is an attempt to articulate meaning against both previous articulations and the abyss of the cosmos. The notion that all poetry is born of struggle is neither new nor revelatory; importing gnosticism and Freud into the commentary only muddies the waters. Struggle is not the same as "catastrophe" (a term he never defines) and incorporeal, intelligible structure is not the same as the yawning abyss. Professor Bloom also seems to conflate the seeing eye which views the cosmos and the touching hand which "feels" the cosmos hence, he is blind to the numerous references to vision in Emerson and others in favor of his pet thesis, all knowing is a grasping and deforming. Ironically, as he lashes out at the deconstructionists and the Lacanians for their inability to explain one or more art forms he, himself, is unable to conduct a serious, sustained reading of philosophy or literature. Indeed, the good professor never articulates the "difference" between poetry and philosophy. This fatal flaw renders the rest of his "radical" reading so much bric-a-brac. Perhaps we could turn his "reading" back upon himself and ask the honorable professor what sort of pre-adolescent "catastrophe" he is attempting to defend himself from by the creation of such an elaborate "theory of reading" or, even more on point, what type of "catastrophe" a Freudian "catastrophe theory" is attempting to work through.

The major benefit of the book is in its passionate argument that all poetry is indeed an attempt at articulating the structure of an otherwise mute cosmos. The rest is a procrustean coffin.

What are the prerequisites for performing a strong reading of this strongest of critics? Wherefore the mirth and mettle to become equal to Bloom's (at times) terrifying paradigmata for the belated student of literature? Bloom acknowledges Neil Hertz for likening his books to a perverse blend of Piransi and Rube Goldberg, dismissing our critic's oeuvre as a scatterbrain "melange of homemade contraptions and imaginary spaces." Bloom's response to this is characteristically funny and ingenious, not to mention invigorating. "I accept this but universalize it.... The triumphant point of a Rube Goldberg is not that it is a twittering machine, or that it goes through amazing, far-fetched convolutions in order to perform a simple operation in a howlingly complicated way, BUT THAT IT WORKS -- not by getting the job done, but by an audacious inventiveness that exposes, however parodistically, the truth that the job's aim cannot be distinguished from its origins"(45). A critical pragmatist will derive the means of his analysis out of the special requirements demanded by the text under review. If, for example, the poetry of William Blake seems to call for the disinterment of certain secular religious traditions (whether Gnostic, Kabbalistic, or Freudian), the critic has every incentive to explore and enlarge upon these paradigms, to bring the spiritual history of mankind to bear upon the younger text. Virtually all of Bloom's detractors refuse to come to terms with his bare-bones speculative Pragmatism, wherein a theory's "truth" lies in its workability and use-value, rather than on a logical schemata of spec and modelization. "Poetry and criticism are useful not for what they really are, but for whatever poetic and critical use you can usurp them to, which means that interpretive poems and poetic interpretations are concepts you make happen [poetry], rather than concepts of being [philosophy]"(39). The transmittance of power from master to ephebe entails the birth-pang zero-hour of "catastrophe-creation," a breaking open of the visionary structure in order to reassemble oneself into a stronger, more originary consciousness, where the ephebe must come to terms with the epistemological brainwashing performed on him by Academe, by his previous, idealizing views of literature and the arts, by friends, family, and other institutional bric-a-brac which mediate (and derange) the Gnostic self, the soporific realm of our Lethean, amnesiac culture. Bloom's criterion is elitist and solitary, the nonpareil of a re-visionary Gnosticism which he's powerfully and complexly developed over the past thirty years.... And as any student of religious tradition can attest, one should *never* (as the previous reviewer has) mistake spiritual difficulty for theoretical vagueness, which is to say, unless one has read and reread all of Bloom from *Anxiety*(1973) to *Omens*(1996), he or she should refrain from making superficial judgements on this, one of the most advanced critical endeavors undertaken since Northrop Frye....

If all of this sounds like hero-worship, the youthful ramblings of a bright-eyed readerly lap-dog (and it probably is), I would only urge the potential reader not to *underestimate* the range of difficulties, both cognitive and spiritual, which Bloom requires of his (ideal) readers, a difficulty blundered through and misconceived by virtually every philosophy major I've encountered. Bloom believes that philosophy is "a stuffed bird" dead on the mantlepiece, that the American academic attempt to conflate Logic and Philosophy into a single, arch-pedantic discipline has nothing interesting to say about the exigencies of poetic apprenticeship. "If we ever get a rigorous philosophy of the Lie, then we may be close to a useful philosophy of poetry"(41). What truly matters in the best poetry, criticism, and philosophy does not need to be strictly "differentiated" in the first place. If one truly needs a philosophical explanation circumscribing the "difference" between poetry and theory, then I would recommend Chap. 7 of Deleuze & Guattari's *What is Philosophy?*. (But as Bloom might say, "Deleuze's problems are not MY problems.") Only a scholarship that reads itself AS literature can become equal TO literature, a stance which can never be assimilated by the philosophical overconfidence which characterizes contemporary Academe. Bloom's central objective in his theoretical phase (1973-1982), as I map it, is to explore and elevate paradigms for reading, to elaborate new slants on "old" traditions, to revivify the art of memory to selectively "free" ourselves from the daemon of Anteriority. The previous reviewer, in an agony of illiterate pedantry, is looking for "theses" to be proved or disproved, "arguments" to be exposed and deconstructed as hypocritical and self-refuting, logic-puzzles to be foreordained and then definitively solved. Professor Bloom, in the line of Hazlitt and Pater, is much too ahead of the game aesthetically to be dragged down by such a-pragmatic resentment. If one wishes to "refute" Bloom, he or she must provide stronger, more productive readings of the specific texts under review (Blake, Freud, Emerson, Whitman, Lindsay, Stevens, Crane, Ashbery, Hollander, and their peers), and not build a polemical soapbox out of irrelevancies such as Bloom's purported failure to articulate the "difference" between the poem and the concept. Was this really Bloom's objective, after all? In the postmortem realms of academic philosophy, a misplaced punctuation-mark can tear down an entire argument, a fatal mote of dust can devastate the whole architectonic machine of logic and rationality. Bloom's theories are only as "correct" as they provide useful paradigms for reading, as they enliven the reader's perception of the text, as they grant power to the suffering ephebe. It would seem to me that the previous reviewer has spent a lot more time reading "theory" than actual novels, poems, plays, short stories, and so is not in a position to play the radical game Bloom has been cultivating in book after book. Strong poetry requires strong readers to carry on the struggle, not pseudo-philosophical pedants piddling after nonexistent truth-functions.