Books: Toynbee Revisited

RECONSIDERATIONS (740 pp.)—Arnold J. Toynbee—Oxford ($10).

THE INTENT OF TOYNBEE'S HISTORY (224 pp.)—Edifed by Edward T. Gargan —Loyola ($5).

Scholars are not a notably generous lot. When they review one another's work, the friction of dry skin is almost audible as they rub their hands over a colleague's failure to sustain a thesis, his reliance on a wrong date, a superseded document or, better still, a bogus one. An expert on the receiving end of this kind of abuse is famed Historian Arnold J. Toynbee. His massive, ten-volume Study of History (TIME, Oct. 18, 1954) left him vulnerable on at least two scores:...