Word: gibbon
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...PORTABLE GIBBON: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (691 pp.) -Edifed by Dero A. Sounders-Viklnq...
Among the stubborn ghosts that stalk the mind of modern literate man are the great books he intends to read some day. High on many such lists-behind War and Peace, but well ahead of the Summa Theologica-is Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From now on, procrastinators will have to find fresh excuses: Gibbon has been streamlined. Dero Saunders, one of the editors of FORTUNE and an old Gibbon fan, has given Decline and Fall a close trim, from 1,400,000 to 200,000 words, without scalping it of all meaning...
Editor Saunders' biggest cut was the entire last half of the work (barring a few excerpts), which deals with the Eastern Empire centered in Constantinople. Except for a final chapter, the story now closes where Gibbon once intended to end it, with the fall of the Western Empire. Into the basket, too, went nearly all of Gibbon's footnotes, by actual count almost a quarter of the original history. Wherever Editor Saunders had to snip the narrative line, he spliced it together with summaries. His estimate of the final collaboration: "96% Gibbon and 4% Saunders...
...Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Nicomachus, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Virgil, Plutarch, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Pascal, Newton, Huygens, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Kant, The Federalist (by Hamilton, Madison and Jay), J. S. Mill, Boswell, Lavoisier, Fourier, Faraday, Hegel, Goethe, Melville, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, William James, Freud. Most controversial omissions: Luther, Calvin, Moliere, Voltaire, Dickens, Balzac, Einstein. † New coinage meaning "collection of topics." * Positivists are the philosophical school, virtually dominant...
...Married Sept.11, 1931, in Kristiansand, Norway, to Norwegian-born Annelise Sorensen. Two daughters and a son: Grace, 19, Joan, 15, and Christopher, 2. In appearance, balding and wiry (5 ft. 11 ½ in., 160 Ibs.) ; retiring, scholarly and shy. For relaxation he most enjoys: reading (favorites: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gibbon) ; piano and guitar; heavy outdoor work on his Pennsylvania farm...