The rhythm of life from season to season brings us to summer -- that annual season of rest, reflection, and respite from mundane concerns.

As the character in Porgy and Bess sings, "Summertime and the livin' is easy, Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high." One thing is for certain -- that character was not a preacher.

School may be out, half of the church board may be on vacation, but the preacher remembers the sage words of the Proverb: "He that gathereth in summer is a wise son; but he that sleepeth in harvest is a son which causes shame" (Proverbs 10:5). That tends to put a damper on the summer siesta.

All that aside, summer offers a unique opportunity for quality reading, sandwiched between Vacation Bible School, summer youth camp, and family vacations. The following is a review of several works worthy of a place in the preacher's summer knapsack.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 382 pp., $18.95 cloth, $7.95 paper.

Six months ago The Closing of the American Mind was properly described as a phenomenon. Today it is an industry. When the trade paperback edition was released in late April, 1988, over 500,000 hardcover copies had already been distributed or sold. Almost 45 weeks on the best-seller list, the book is the biggest surprise the cautious publishing world has seen in years.

The book is hardly the stuff of which best-sellers are made. It is the thoughtful, nearly four-hundred-page soliloquy of a distinguished professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago -- an institution more famous for Nobel prizes than best-sellers.

Put quite simply, The Closing of the American Mind hit an exposed societal nerve. Much as Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Charles Reich's The Greening of America were the surprise professorial tomes of the 1970's and 1960's respectively, Bloom's volume set the terms of public discussion in a season when the very possibility of thoughtful public discussion seemed doubtful.

Allan Bloom is a Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. Bloom is a member of the fraternity of the select few who teach at America's most prestigious centers of learning. This academic context is ever apparent in The Closing of the American Mind, and the lengthy subtitle indicates the impetus for the writing of the volume: Bloom's indictment of the impoverishment of the souls of American students.

The very fact that Bloom included the word 'soul' in the title and uses the word freely throughout the book indicates something of the unique character of the volume. The book would have been a perceptive analysis of American higher education without that unique dimension -- and many critics have responded to The Closing of the American Mind while simply ignoring this critical point: Bloom dares to examine the very souls of his students, and through them to understand modern American society.