Ruin the Sacred Truths

Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present

By: Harold Bloom

Narrated by: Mort Crim

Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's Summary

Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or "J") writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Illiad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best. This book is published by Harvard University Press.

©1989 Harold Bloom (P)2010 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic Reviews

"The wit, the eclecticism and the gripping paradoxes... the force of [Bloom's] intellect carries the reader from pinnacle to pinnacle, showing a new spiritual landscape from each." ( Washington Times)

"In some ways the wildest of the wild men (and women), in some ways the most traditional of the traditionalists, Harold Bloom remains serene amid the turbulence - much of it caused by him. He stands dauntless, a party of one, as thrilling to behold up on the high wire as he is (at times) throttling to read on the page... From this strong critic dealing with these strong poets comes a potent mix of insight." ( Boston Globe)

Not one of Bloom's best

At his best, Bloom is an insightful and entertaining critic. At his worst he is lazy, undisciplined, and derivative. This book unfortunately belongs to the second category. There are occasional flashes of insight but mostly it is a pastiche of cliches, scholarly gossip, and sweeping generalizations. Especially regrettable is the tendency to substitute name-dropping and interpretation-by-association for actual comment on the books in question. A pity to see Bloom's formidable powers squandered on a book like this.

Poor Mort

Mort Crim was a terrific reader of the text he had handed to him when he read the news in Philadelphia. Here, not so much, but it's hard to blame him. Someone should have coached him on the pronunciation of dozens of words--some esoteric and only a very few he probably never heard--that he butchers along the way. "Platonic" is pronounced with a short a (not as in Playdoh); demiurge I thought had three syllables; etc. This is one of Bloom's pivotal books, after he had more or less outlined the canonical works to go with his theory of influence; not that hard to follow if you knew what preceded it with the exception of the chapter on Kafka.