On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Maureen Therese Anderson wrote:
> times is "Civilization," which is apparently like a cyber-version of that
> old set of teleology-tomes by Will and Ariel Durant (touchingly collecting
> dust in just about every used booked store I've ever frequented).
Believe or not, Durant is a brilliant writer and this is a brilliant series. Nobody believes this, because he was so successfully marketed to the middle class 40 or 50 years ago, back when "raising the intellectual level of popular discourse" was considered a progressive ideal. The ironic result was that lots of parents bought it for their children, but never read it themselves, and the children saw that their parents owned it and thought "Ha, must be middle brow crap" and never even considered reading it. Of all the discoveries I'm made in my literary peregrinations, the fact that Durant's books are good is probably the most jaw dropping. Tell people that G. Legman's 1800 page monograph on dirty jokes is dripping with erudition and they'll say Yeah, I've heard that. But tell them that Durant is great and they'll just stare at you as if you started talking about your past lives.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
An ostensive definition of "orotund," from a discussion of an official biography of King George V of England:
"For seventeen years," Nicolson disparagingly recorded in his diary while working on the King's early married life, "he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps." But taste and tact came to the rescue, as these astringent sentiments were clothed in the orotund platitudes of the official life: "These years succeeded each other with placid similitude. He lived the life of a privileged country gentleman, unostentatious, comparatively retired, almost obscure."
--from a TLS review article by David Carradine, reprinted in his book of collected articles, _The Pleasures of the Past_. __________________________________________________________________________