A posthumous collection of articles, essays, and lectures by Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time begins with my personal favorite piece of his, "A Shameless Worship of Heroes", which establishes the tone for the rest of the set: "history...is the record of...exceptional men and women...inventors, scientists, statesmen, poets, artists, musicians, philosophers and saints, and of the additions which they made to the technology and wisdom, the artistry and decency, of their people and mankind...Therefore I see history not as a dreary scene of politics and carnage, but as the struggle of man -- through genius -- with the obdurate inertia of matter and the baffling mystery of mind; the struggle to understand, control and remake himself and the world.

"I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little farther ahead; men carving marble into forms ennobling men; men molding peoples into better instruments of greatness; men making a language of music and music out of language; men dreaming of finer lives, and living them. Here is a process of creation more vivid than in any myth, a godliness more real than in any creed."

This would be difficult to top, but the set continues solidly with "The Ten Greatest Thinkers". I wasn't sure I'd agree with Durant's selections here based on some of his other work I've read, but he makes a point of choosing thinkers based on the impact of their thought rather than on his own personal preferences, and his choices are not merely respectable, but mostly difficult to argue with. From the greatest early philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas in the Middle Ages, to the scientists whose discoveries helped shape the modern world, from Copernicus to Newton to Darwin, Durant delineates their epoch-making achievements with his inimitable stylistic grace and flair.

This is followed by "The Ten Greatest Poets," which is somewhat less interesting as Durant frankly admits to following his personal preferences here as he wouldn't dare attempt to select the objectively greatest poets of all time. And my own personal list would differ somewhat, but Durant encourages that in his readers, and his own list is again respectable and his language a joy to read, as are the selections he quotes from his poets to back up his choices.

Next is "The One Hundred Best Books for an Education", which may be slightly outdated now, but many of the books he discusses are still well worth reading and some of them essential for a well-rounded education. And his musings on the composition of an ideal library and the value of reading are quite timeless.

Rounding out the collection are "The Ten Peaks of Human Progress" and "Twelve Vital Dates in World History". "Ten Peaks" threw me a little, as I would have expected it to more or less mirror "The Ten Greatest Thinkers" (which would make sense given what Durant wrote about history and progress in "A Shameless Worship of Heroes), but he takes a different tack here and discusses the significance of some major developments of human society, many too early to be attributed to a particular thinker, such as speech, fire, tool-making, the domestication of animals, and agriculture, to some relatively more recent broad developments such as science, education, writing and print, and morality. This is as thought-provoking an overview of human progress as one would expect from Durant.

"Twelve Vital Dates" gives another such overview, this time with the obvious difference that it is organized around a sequence of specific historical events, the earlier ones tied to the deaths of several major historical figures, from Buddha to Socrates to Caesar to the birth of Christ to the death of Mohammed. A couple of the later dates are instead tied to particular inventions, which I particularly appreciated, from Gutenberg's printing press to Watt's steam engine.

On the whole, this is a nice collection presenting some of the very best of Will Durant's short works on the highlights of human progress.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3BKTDEJBODJST ( )

From a content-perspective this is one of the most valuable I've ever read. ( )

A slim little book. Some nice tidbits of knowledge. I disagree with many of his "greatest" poets and thinkers. He is of the long line of liberals who say they like Christ but then disparage Christianity as just corruption and war and evil. His swipes against the religion that was the underpinning of all the democracy and enlightenment he adores makes for a strange disconnect, at least in my mind. I disagree with some of his peaks and dates, too. That said, the chapter "A Shameless Worship of Heroes" is a brilliant explanation of, well, his shameless worship of heroes. He counters the modern, ever-since-Marx notion that great persons don't matter; that historians should study masses of people and cold, dead economies and demographies; that personal choice is illusory, that the materialist dialectic makes the choices. Good stuff. ( )

An interesting but very short collection of some of Will Durant's essays about the 10 greatest poets, the 12 most defining dates in history, the 10 most important thinkers, etc. Interesting to read, thought-provoking in content. We're discussing this one at book club on Monday night, and I'm looking forward to the discussion. ( )