Culture Syllabus*

ADVENTURES IN GENIUS--Will Durant --Simon & Schuster ($4)./-

Marx was wrong, says Will Durant. "The real history of man is not in prices and wages, nor in elections and battles, nor in the even tenor of the common man; it is in the lasting contributions made by geniuses to the sum of human civilization and culture. . . . [The world's] history is properly the history of its great men." Says Durant, the pendulum has swung too far; it is time to turn again to hero-worship. "Too soon we extinguished the flame of our hope and our reverence. Let us change the ikons, and light the candles again."

This syllabus of culture, or notebook of Durant, lists: ten Greatest Thinkers (Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Copernicus, Bacon, Newton, Voltaire, Kant, Darwin) ; ten Greatest Poets (Homer, Author of the Psalms, Euripides, Lucretius, Dante, Lipo, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Whitman); 100 Best Books for an education (approximate cost, $300; time required for reading: four years at seven hours per week, ten hours per volume). Syllabuster Durant reviews his favorite modern philosophers (Spengler, Keyserling, Bertrand Russell), his favorite modern literary lights (Gustave Flaubert, Anatole France, John Cowper Powys), fills up the rest of his 426 pages with comments on his trips to Palestine, India, China, with a reprinted debate, philosophical address, open letter, and magazine article.

Not content with a mere abracadabresque chanting of holy names, Durant follows up his list of required reading with many a hortatory ejaculation. "Absorb every word of Taine's chapter on Byron. . . . Do not miss the odes of Keats. . . . Go then, to William James. . . ." Nothing if not an enthusiast, he exclaims of John Cowper Powys: "Here is the finest American prose since Santayana."*

The Significance. Not many philosophers have become popular in their own lifetime, in the sense that their writing has brought them much money. But Syllabuster Will Durant, ably backed by Popularizing Publishers Simon & Schuster, made a killing with his The Story of Philosophy. Critics scoffed at it, pointed out that the sum-total of philosophy could not be compressed or even adequately presented in one book or by one man. Readers bought over 500,000 copies, felt their culture increasing whether they read it or not. Adventures in Genius should suit the same public.

The Author-- William James Durant is an escaped Roman Catholic, was educated by French nuns in North Adams, Mass, (his birthplace, 1885), later by Jesuits in Jersey City. He found reporting on Hearst's New York Evening Journal too fast for a philosopher, became professor of many languages at Seton Hall College, South Orange, N. J. He entered the seminary there, but reading in the library cost him his faith. After a tour of Europe he took up graduate work in philosophy, biology, psychology at Columbia University. From 1914-27 he was director of Manhattan's Labor Temple School. He is married, has one daughter (Ethel Benvenuta), lives at Great Neck, L. I., where for the last five years he has been working on a five-volume Story of Civilization. The first volume, on the Orient, is to be published next year. Other books: Transition, The Mansions of Philosophy, The Case for India.

/-Published May 28.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.

*Spanish-born, cosmopolite, onetime Harvard professor.

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