Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle Reading App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Apple
Android
Windows Phone
Android
To get the free app, enter your email address or mobile phone number.
Best Books of the Year So Far
Looking for something great to read? Browse our editors' picks for 2015's Best Books of the Year So Far in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, children's books, and much more.
$31.49
FREE Shipping on orders over $35.
Only 16 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Gift-wrap available.
Frequently Bought Together
{"currencyCode":"USD","itemData":[{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":31.49,"ASIN":"0446691291","moqNum":1,"isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":16.07,"ASIN":"1573225142","moqNum":1,"isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":16.85,"ASIN":"157322751X","moqNum":1,"isPreorder":0}],"shippingId":"0446691291::eD4aA9DslY31tmXKTl0OqbbNOIeSw8Ysr7R%2By2xHrN803%2BLHfSdpr2w2gxI7evg0XbMQT6%2B3aN6JLo%2F%2FX6b%2FDXXrnhYd3qmpO1%2Fo5upL%2Bsw%3D,1573225142::6RO0oLoKdbuJRCDfzGt3ba5Jn%2Fu6zxBgISj5m5u1VY5awoYyGOuBlGYiuzjiDjQUjBnU9H4QaILY6%2F2haKqLx%2FWnbOW%2BUvIcohTkZZrJhXA%3D,157322751X::f7IGJCbMAoLYmFyPtCNP2uiLrr3pWJZEQTWGboOEgW9N2xiDPQw6FkEYIr6r8rh9F33vbai8tnFr%2FJ%2BpLWYi%2BmbTcfKeqkSG49vo%2BBC1WDU%3D","sprites":{"addToWishlist":["wl_one","wl_two","wl_three"],"addToCart":["s_addToCart","s_addBothToCart","s_add3ToCart"],"preorder":["s_preorderThis","s_preorderBoth","s_preorderAll3"]},"shippingDetails":{"xz":"same","xy":"same","yz":"same","xyz":"same"},"tags":["x","y","z","w"],"strings":{"addToWishlist":["Add to Wish List","Add both to Wish List","Add all three to Wish List","Add all four to Wish List"],"addToCart":["Add to Cart","Add both to Cart","Add all three to Cart","Add all four to Cart"],"showDetailsDefault":"Show availability and shipping details","shippingError":"An error occurred, please try again","hideDetailsDefault":"Hide availability and shipping details","priceLabel":["Price:","Price for both:","Price for all three:","Price For All Four:"],"preorder":["Pre-order this item","Pre-order both items","Pre-order all three items","Pre-order all four items"]}}
This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.
Best Books of the Month
Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen categories.
whatever we call best in ourselves, our spark of `high divinity', harold bloom finds reflected from the authors of the great texts, the texts pretty much found on library shelves, recognized as having lasting merit by university professors of the humanities and the arts and most of the students taught by them. there is a core group of maybe twenty books everyone will agree to accept, providing they are not ranked in any particular order; but beyond that group, more so when the number reaches, and is limited to, one hundred, a lot of very good books, great books, of lasting merit which exist will not make bloom's cut. an apt example is his own Western Canon with its many lists of authors.
bloom's choices will not please everyone, nor has the choosing proved easy work for a selector as widely read as harold bloom. his chosen one hundred, he claims, as his arbitrary choice, and the chosen limited to the dead. they are his choices and so, within the pages, the reader and browser are stuck with them to make what one can of the contents of the volume.
bloom avoids a history of ideas approach and views the great books throughout history from a biographical approach. to his purpose, each genius is given a brief biographical sketch, a short sample of their writing, and bloom's contribution to how genius in each individual case is manifested.
`Gerard De Nerval,' for instance, `...proved his genius by transmuting his illness into a permanent literary myth.'
`Baudelaire's fusion of Satanism and Hermetism is an act of original genius.'
`The essence of Blake's genius is its exuberance and its autonomy, its courage to rethink and resee everything for itself.Read more ›
Comment
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
I stumbled upon this book as a casual reader and as such, even though I was familiar by name with most of the authors here, I had never read a most of the older authors (Milton, Dante, Goethe, etc), thinking their books were too "old" and therefore unrelatable. What a huge mistake!
"Genius" is the culmination of Bloom's more than 60 years of attentive reading and has a theme that demands of the author an erudition that very few people have had throughout history, let alone now when vapid distraction is so readily available. Only someone that has read and re-read the Western Cannon many times over and over could make some of the brilliant connections that Bloom makes in "Genius". It does definitely help that Bloom was a freakishly-fast reader, during his prime he could go through an impressive 1000 pages in one hour!
While not being a fast as Bloom, I still went through this 800 pages book faster than I had ever read anything else before. Harold Blooms makes his case for the genius of each of the individuals in "Genius" in such a compelling and seductive way that one couldn't wait to finish reading it and getting their hands on the masterpieces he recommends.
Bloom's arguments are clear and logical. Even if you don't agree with him, you will always know where he stands. One of my biggest beefs with literary critics is how a few of them, lacking the cojones to say something that might be deemed controversial, try to obfuscate their arguments and run laps around the reader to confuse her. You don't need to worry about that with Bloom.Read more ›
Comment
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
This thick book is Harold Bloom's meditation on literary genius, by which he means not exactly an extraordinary intelligence but a communication with the "God within," an internal source of world-expanding creative inspiration, that only few people manage to achieve. He selects one hundred authors -- the list, he stresses, is by no means hermetic -- in the literary canon who in his estimation have done this, subdividing them into ten groups of ten, each group represented by a concept from the Kabbalah called a Sefirah. For example, under Hesed, or "God's covenant love for men and women," he locates Donne, Pope, Swift, Austen, and others who he feels manifest various aspects (especially irony, one of his favorite topics) of such love. Which authors have genius? Shakespeare, obviously, and all the classical poets whose works have survived for a number of centuries, and Bloom's personal hero of literary criticism, Samuel Johnson, and even T.S. Eliot, towards whom Bloom displays a dichotomous attitude of admiration mixed with hostility. What evidence of genius is offered that elevates these authors above the merely talented? For Renaissance historian and prose stylist extraordinaire Walter Pater, it is his "secularization of the religious epiphany"; for Balzac, it is his mercurial comic criminal Vautrin; for Robert Browning, it is his perfected development of the dramatic monologue.Read more ›
Comment
Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more
This item: Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
![]({"http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51239KRU05L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg":[210,346],"http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51239KRU05L._SX300_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg":[302,499]})
