Word: durant
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...WILL DURANT...
...Renaissance, by Will Durant. Volume V of the ambitious popular survey of Western civilization which has engaged historian Durant for nearly 25 years 'TIME, Sept...
Several other occupations-teacher, anarchist fellow-traveler, popularizer of philosophy-claimed Will Durant's attention first. But last week, sitting in his comfortable Hollywood home, just a step from his own swimming pool, successful Historian Durant scribbled away, well beyond the halfway mark, at the job he marked out for himself in 1912. The Renaissance is the fifth fat volume in Will Durant's story of civilization, and like its predecessor volumes it is a highly readable and informative popular survey...
...history of civilization," Historian Durant once said in definition of his method, "is a river on whose waters soldiers and politicians are fighting and shedding ballots and blood; but on the banks of the river, people are raising children, building homes, making scientific inventions, puzzling about the universe, writing music and literature." In The Renaissance Durant pays just enough mind to the soldiers and politicians to establish the drift of the times, then quickly joins the builders on the banks...
Medicis in Action. The Renaissance, as he lays it out, "first of all ... took money-smelly bourgeois money"; and he growls for good measure a byword of the 19th century materialism that shaped his attitude: "Money is the root of all civilization." Following this economic predilection, Durant gives the clearest description in any one-volume history of the age of the fiscal and political hotbed of Florence, where those hardy perennials, the Medici, first reared their brilliant heads. Item: he recites with delight how the fiscal-minded Florentines won a war against Venice and Naples by calling in so many...