A review by clayjs
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom

5.0

A dense tome on the current state of the American university focused primarily on Cornell and the University of Chicago, the author's stomping grounds, [b: The Closing of the American Mind|75812|The Closing of the American Mind|Allan Bloom|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1291063942s/75812.jpg|1856482] is both difficult and fairly satisfying. It makes me a little sad to read other reviews on here for this book, because many of the people writing them obviously didn't give it the time or attention it requires to read it well. To say the book is conservative propaganda is puerile. His interaction with politics in the work is well-reasoned and makes many concessions on both sides, but more importantly, it's secondary to the book's actual purpose, and for a political philosophy professor, it shows remarkable restraint. To say that his purpose is to bring the Great Books back into the university, one would have to have missed the chapter on why Great Books education is simplistic and silly. I'm not even going to address the guy who suggested it's racist for describing Affirmative Action. Bloom is fair and subtle, and yes, a bit elitist, and his book is complex and should be treated so. It is a musing on the history of philosophy and the universal search for truth and meaning, a lament for the dying hunger for ideas in America's youth, and a cogent observation of the priorities and relationships of university students in the late '80s. [b: The Closing of the American Mind|75812|The Closing of the American Mind|Allan Bloom|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1291063942s/75812.jpg|1856482] is 30-years-old this year, and we as a nation are watching his unheeded admonitions coming to pass. Of course, I don't agree with everything Bloom suggests in his book, and the sections on sex and music ring with a certain tinny Get-off-my-lawn-ness that put me off a bit, but it's hard to blame a 30-year-old book for feeling a bit dated.