Word: durante
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...Reason Begins, by Will and Ariel Durant. In the first volume of a trilogy with which he hopes to complete his formidable Story of Civilization, the author (assisted by his wife) examines the 16th and 17th centuries with admirably balanced but sometimes passionless rationalism. He finds the whole period marked by "the rise of murderous nationalism and the decline of murderous theologies...
...Reason Begins, by Will and Ariel Durant. In the first volume of a trilogy with which he hopes to complete his vast and generally excellent Story of Civilization, the author (assisted by his wife) examines the 16th and 17th centuries with admirably balanced but sometimes passionless rationalism. He finds the whole period marked by "the rise of murderous nationalism and the decline of murderous theologies...
Historian Durant's province is scarcely less vast, as readers of his massive, generally excellent Story of Civilization know. The seventh volume in that story is also one of the best. It introduces the period that Durant regards as his own. What was planned as Durant's final volume is now to become part of a trilogy-with The Age of Louis XIV (1963) and The Age of Voltaire (1965) still ahead...
Pardon for All. Although the Age of Reason thus becomes the most scrupulously scrutinized period of Durant's entire enterprise, this volume contains some curious errors of emphasis: the great migration of peasants and adventurers, jailbirds and divines from the England of James I to the New World is dismissed in a paragraph; the years during which Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov and the first of the Romanov dynasty were transforming Muscovite Russia into an imperial power get only six pages...
...chronicling the great events that convulsed the century-the religious wars, the confrontation of Christianity and rationalist philosophy, the growing defiance of the authority of kings-Durant is painstaking, persuasive and tolerant. Even academic critics no longer dismiss him as a mere popularizer, and he shows once again that, better than any other historian living, he understands how to dis till the flavor of an age from its arts and manners. Like one of his favorite figures, Montaigne, he can "speak to paper as I do to the first person I meet." Indeed, he is often at his most eloquent...