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By Allan Bloom. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. 395 pp. Cloth, $22.95, ISBN 0-671-70777-9. Paper, $11.00, ISBN 0-671-74726-6.)
Quite possibly, many readers will pick up this book to learn some intellectual biography. Allan Bloom authored the surprising best seller of 1987, The Closing of the American Mind, and his publisher has now assembled a collection of writings by Bloom, almost all of them predating that book. Giants and Dwarfs does indeed provide a larger framework for The Closing. Certainly the reader will derive a better sense of the Straussian paradigm that has so greatly influenced Bloom. The centrality of Jean-Jacques Rousseau stands out more clearly in the collection, as does the significance of Alexis de Tocqueville.
Nonetheless, the essays claim our attention on their own merits. Bloom leads us into intellectual encounters with a wide range of ancients and moderns. He takes up Plato and Jonathan Swift, William Shakespeare and...