I am so sorry to be doing this, but I wouldn't want anyone who has read the review by Midwest Book Review to think, as its final sentence asserts, that this "combines his two benchmark books under one cover." I happen to have a paperback edition of THE LIFE OF JESUS CRITICALLY EXAMINED, translated into English by the famous novelist George Eliot, itself 812 pages, in which Strauss exhibited what Nietzsche called the real Straussian genius, as a scholar who was adept at compiling a variety of scholarly views on the subject with a bit of dogmatic import. As Strauss put it on page 780 of his truly great work, "as subject of the predicate which the church assigns to Christ, we place, instead of an individual, an idea." Not surprisingly, the church wanted to maintain its own selection of views on Christ, but it was still possible for Strauss to switch from theology to more popular matters of public opinion, in which pompous thinkers like Wagner and Schopenhauer were lightly skimmed over in favor of the famous old masters of German thought. Wagner and Nietzsche found Strauss particularly vulnerable to attack, and my familiarity with this book is entirely the result of Nietzsche's attempt to destroy it, which provided him a freedom of speech that he could never have savored if he had remained in Germany, a dark and dreary place thoroughly soaked in beer, if Nietzsche can be given any credibility on matters relating to the country of his birth. Strauss deserves to be recognized as the best recorder of ideas with which the most intellectual pretenders to culture intoxicated themselves with their beer, but the jump from Christianity to this, the contrast called forth by the title of this book, is hardly any indication of any great leap forward. At one time, this might have been like a little red book of Chairman Mao Quotations for those who valued their own opinions above all else, but it had been bested by 1873. After Strauss was buried, Nietzsche wrote to one of his friends that he could hope "that I did not sadden his last months, and that he died without knowing anything about me. It's rather on my mind." (11 February 1874) It might also be on the mind of anyone who reads this book today.