(2 of 2)
But if the book does not live up to its high-toned title, it stands without wobbling as an account of a merry and successful rendezvous with life. The mental reactions of the author interest the reader, less than the things he does. It is far more engaging and exciting to read Author Durant's account of early and trivial love affairs, his experiences as a reporter, his encounters with many people all of whom are described with humanity and warmth, than to read the story of how he came to think that there was no God, or what he felt about Marxian Socialism. Yet, if it is the intention of any biography to present the doings of its subject so that his character may be at least partially under stood, Author Durant has achieved his intention. One's liking or de testation for a man is caused not by reading what he thought of religion but by reading what he said to his mother-in-law. Thus the autobiography of Will Durant presents the story of an energetic, unhumorous, intelligent, conceited young philosopher, whose disguised pomposity is outweighed by a healthy and unphilosophical liking for a pretty girl, or a good book or a vulgar story. The Author. Will Durant's life, his opinions, his eccentricities are thoroughly covered in this book. It does not, however, include the period in which his name ceased to be that of an obscure philosophy teacher and became instead that of author of a best seller, an author whose fame and reputation were so great that he was employed to report the Gray-Snyder murder trial for the New York Telegram. Of The Story of Philosophy, his popular magnum opus, the author remarked that the thing he liked best about the book was the title, the thing he liked least was the fact that it was finished. Small, spry, 42, Author Durant (who would look like a brownie but for his goatee) likes to be busy. Now in Sea Cliff, L. I., where he lives, he is busy writing a four-volume history of the 19th Century, of which the first volume will be published in two or more years.
Treatise
THE HUMAN BODY—Logan Clendening, M. D.—Knopf ($6). No merryandrew, no practical joker is quite so detestable as the physician who attempts a dreary levity at the bedside of a bored and uncomfortable patient. Dr. Clendening's wit is not of this variety; it is a tonic, like codliver oil, that enables lay readers to digest properly his capable and exhaustive description of the human body and its grotesque functions. Valuable, clear, factual writing about what causes constipation, hay fever, baldness, consumption, obesity, what people ought to eat, what they ought to marry and why they die, is admirably entangled with such impertinences as "The French and other savage tribes," or When to the age of forty they come, Men run to belly and women to bum.
*Democracy and Ideals. The Literary Discipline. The Private Life of Helen of Troy, Galahad.
†TRANSITION—Will Durant—Simon & Schuster ($3).