Heroes of History  (English, Paperback, Durant Will)

Heroes Of History: A Brief History Of Civilization From Ancient Times To The Dawn Of The Modern Age outlines the ideas, lives and minds of the visionaries who helped characterize and outline civilization as we now know it.

Summary Of The Book

Heroes Of History: A Brief History Of Civilization From Ancient Times To The Dawn Of The Modern Age encapsulates the history of our civilization up until the eighteenth century. Initially deemed to be a sequence of audio chapters, the author redesigned it to be a written work, one that would provide accurate information about mankind’s past and world history in a simple and comprehensible manner, easy for any novice or amateur to relate to and learn from.

Spanning over 2000 years, the history of modern man is described in a succinct and abridged version. The book starts with narratives about Buddha, Confucius, Ikhnaton and Shakespeare, thereafter discussing Rome, Greece, the Reformation and the story of Jesus in great detail. The author was unable to complete all of the planned twenty three chapters. He passed away after completing only twenty one of them. His work was discovered posthumously by John Little over two decades after it was written.

The chapters in Heroes Of History: A Brief History Of Civilization From Ancient Times To The Dawn Of The Modern Age cover topics like What is Civilization, From the Pyramids to Ikhnaton, The Golden Age of Athens, The Roman Empire, The Human Christ, The Renaissance, and the Catholic Reformation to name a few. The history of China is covered in twelve pages, whereas Indian history has nine pages devoted to it. The history of the Roman empire spans four chapters, and three chapters each are dedicated to the Renaissance, ancient Greece and the Reformation.

About Will Durant

Will Durant was an American philosopher, author, historian, teacher, librarian and reporter.

He has co-authored The Story of Civilization, The Story of Philosophy and The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time.

Born in Massachusetts in 1885, he started his career as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal in 1907 and progressed to a teaching job in New Jersey, from which he resigned in 1913. He began giving lectures at the Presbyterian church, and the idea of his series The Story of Civilization stemmed from there. Durant was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. He died in 1981, at the age of 96.