Customer Reviews

Chaim Potok's The Chosen (Bloom's Guides)

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Amazon displays links, editorial descriptions and user reviews for the actual mass market paperback on the web page for the Bloom's Guide. Basically, the Amazon web page for the Bloom's Guide is selling Harold Bloom's in-depth, college level analysis of the book, not the book itself.

Yet, the identical information shown on this product page is displayed on the mass market Chaim Potok book pages - there is no distinction that these are two different books.

This was very misleading to my 15 year old high school student who needed the actual book for a school assignment and we purchased the Bloom version by accident. Bloom's analysis is of no use to her as it is over her head and won't help her achieve what her assignment entails.

Very disappointed in Amazon - I hope they fix this.

Not what I expected but the book was interesting to read. Disagreed with most of the comments. The Chosen, the novel, is a great book.

The truth of this book, is that it is subversively against Chassidism. Chassidism is portrayed as just the opposite of what it truly is. It's portrayed as rigid and out of date and frankly not 'with it.' Of course Danny must be a genius if he wants to break free of the mold of Chassidism. I grew up in a secular house-hold, and it seems that the calls of chassidism were within me even then, because I had a distate for the book and felt it had a significant bias. While Danny longs to break free of chassidism, I have found that Chassidism has helped set me free. It seems to me that Danny was just the opposite of a genius, and Chaim Potok was capitlizing on the secular world's viewpoint to create a book that was not so subtly anti-chassid. It's only years later now that I realize why I had such a distaste for the book. The book points away from the truth, not towards it.