A book about Leo Strauss - and an essay by John Updike

Was Leo Strauss the forerunner of the neoconservative thinking? Or, to put it bluntly, was he the intellectual father of Paul Wolfowitz and the other neo-cons of today? Stephen B. Smith argues that this wasn't the case. His book, Reading Leo Strauss, is analyzed in NYT. Strauss was a towering presence (Joseph Cropsey), preoccupied by the Jerusalemite and Athenian dimensions of the European culture, and his intellectual relationships are with Maimonides, Spinoza and Scholem.





Booksellers, you are the salt of the book world. You are on the front line where, while the author cowers in his opium den, you encounter — or "interface with," as we say now — the rare and mysterious Americans who are willing to plunk down $25 for a book. Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
So starts the essay written by John Updike - a meditation on the effects of the modern technologies over the universe of the written worlds.