"Profound. Draws more deeply on [Bloom's] scholarly expertise. Shows his readers how even literary criticism must be decoded like a dramatic poem or a novel before we can consume it."--Eileen M. Hunt, Times Literary Supplement "An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of his passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable."--Seamus Perry, Literary Review "Perhaps Bloom's most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America's leading 20th-century literary minds."-- Publishers Weekly "Early on in this astute collection, [Bloom] marks his terrain: 'What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.

' Reading, this stirring collection testifies, 'helps in staying alive.'"-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "The arms Bloom advises we take up against our sea of troubles are the poems and prose that gave him so much joy, inspiration, sadness, pain, and vigor over the course of his life."--Lucas Spiro, Arts Fuse "We hear the intuitive Bloom, the open and receptive reader, the brooder and fabulous conversation partner, talking and chuckling, searching and scowling; we see him rubbing his brow and thinking aloud."--Peter Cole, Caesura "All criticism, [Bloom] said, is autobiographical, and nothing in his work proves it more than this last testament to his faith in himself and his good will toward others."-- D. H. Lawrence Review "This is Bloom at his most capacious and fierce of thought, always ready to surprise. For all the losses he tallies, a great smile hovers through the book.

"--Kenneth Gross "In the end, only words have a chance of outliving us, and Bloom records his best guesses at the words that might endure. Until the end, Bloom was a man of incessant curiosity, with more questions than answers about an essential poetic imagination."--Thylias Moss, Professor Emerita, University of Michigan "This book is superb, utterly convincing, and absolutely invigorating. Bloom's final argument with mortality ultimately has a rejuvenating effect upon the reader, and is nothing short of a revelation."--David Mikics, author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age "I felt reading this book the way Virginia Woolf in her diary describes her feeling about reading Shakespeare: 'I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed . is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own.'"--Laura Quinney, author of William Blake on Self and Soul "Bloom helps us grasp what Dickinson calls 'vaster attitudes,' allowing us to take a proud flight and to disdain, for a time, our own mortality."--William Flesch, Brandeis University.