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More than just a huge #1 bestseller, this is one of the great and vitally important books of our time. Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of twentieth century America is really an intellectual crisis. From the universities' lack of purpose to their students' lack of learning, from the jargon of liberation to the supplanting of reason by "creativity," Bloom shows how American democracy has unwittingly played host to vulgarized Continental ideas of nihilism and despair, of relativism disguised as tolerance. Bloom demonstrates that the collective mind of the American university is closed to the principles of the Western tradition, and that it is especially closed to the spiritual heritage of the West, which gave rise to the university in the first place.

Christopher Hurt is an accomplished narrator with a lengthy resume of popular titles for Blackstone. A graduate of George Washington University's acting program, he currently resides in New York City.

Allan Bloom is Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College and codirector of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. He has taught at Yale, University of Paris, University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, and Cornell, where he was the recipient of the Clark Teaching Award in 1967. His other books are Plato's Republic (translator and editor), Politics and the Arts: Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert (translator and editor), Rousseau's Emile (translator and editor), and Shakespeare's Politics(with Harry V. Jaffa). He lives in Chicago.