Word: durants
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...Will Durant...
...Spinoza's fault. In 1908 William James Durant, the Massachusetts-born son of unschooled French-Canadian immigrants, was well on his way to fulfilling his mother's dream that he become a priest. Then he came upon a copy of Spinoza's Ethics in a seminary library. So convincing did he find the 17th century Dutch pantheist that he quickly abandoned the church, deciding instead, as he put it, to pursue a "more intellectually honest life." What he found was another calling. For 48 years, eleven volumes and nearly 10,000 pages, Will Durant labored with monastic...
DIED. Ariel Durant, 83, Russian immigrant who as a 15-year-old student in 1913 married her American high school teacher, Will Durant, later collaborating with him on the eleven-volume magnum opus The Story of Civilization, and sharing with him the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Rousseau and Revolution, No. 10 in their series; in Hollywood, Calif. Durant worked unofficially as a researcher and collaborator on the first six volumes of the series, but her name appeared as a coauthor on the last five, as well as on their jointly written A Dual Autobiography...
...quest for the meaning of life is rendered as a series of set-piece seminars: one sage gives his philosophy, and then Cyrus goes off to seek another, who does the same. For long stretches, the narrator seems to be conducting a survey of ancient thought a la Will Durant: "As I understand Pythagoras-and who does in his complex entirety?-he thought that the single unit was the basis of all things. From the single unit derives number. From numbers, points. From points, lines of connection. From lines, planes and, hence, solids. From solids...
...Durant, a former prosecutor, was rated a hard-liner when appointed in 1975, but rarely has lived up to the billing. His controversial decisions include a 1978 ruling that under a technicality in a state law, pistols were not firearms, and thus carrying a concealed pistol was not an offense. Such actions have won him a nickname: "Let-'Em-Go Joe." In the Snell case, Durant maintains that "the state was having trouble finding witnesses," and that without plea bargaining Snell might have gone scot free. Not so, insists Dade County Assistant State Attorney Leonard Glick: "I told...