Will Durant’s The Life of Greece, the second volume in the “Story of Civilization” series, was published in 1939, a grim year for “Western Civilization.”  Despite – or perhaps because – the book was such a popular success, it was reviewed in a handful of academic journals. Two reviews of this volume nicely illustrate the camps into which academic readers of Durant seemed to fall:  either they lauded him for his ability to bring to the distant past a sense of immediacy and vividness for the general reader, or they lambasted him for his hamfisted handling of historical argumentation and Read more