About the book
Historians Will and Ariel Durant, winners of a Pulitzer Prize, distill what they noticed while writing The Story of Civilization into a short volume of about 120 pages. After finishing its tenth volume, they gathered events and comments that might shed light on present affairs, future probabilities, human nature and the conduct of states. Across 13 chapters they read some 5,000 years of history through war, religion, biology, economics, morals, race, government, socialism, character, geography, and growth and decay. The final chapter asks whether progress is real.
Ray Dalio said it is the book he would give every graduating senior, and Naval Ravikant praised how much ground it covers in so few pages. James Mattis included it in the list of favorite books printed in Call Sign Chaos.
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This book has 5 recommendations
Ray Dalio (Founder/Bridgewater Associates)
The book I’d give [every graduating senior in college or high school] would be 'Lessons From History'. This is the Durants, they were maybe the greatest historians of all time. Anyway, of 5,000 years of history, probably wrote 5,000 pages on it, and they took this book - I think it’s 104 pages - and they took the themes of history, it could be from religion, natural resources, who knows, each one of these things, and they looked at it for themes of history through history. I think that, that would be great.
Naval Ravikant (CEO & Co-Founder/AngelList)
Great book. I really like how it summarizes some of the larger themes of history. Very incisive and, unlike most history books, is actually kind of small and it covers a lot of ground.
James Clear (Author)
On James Clear’s The 10 Books with the Most Page-For-Page Wisdom - James Clear
Mark Manson (Author)
The Durants wrote an 11-volume “History of the World” series that took up pretty much all of their adult lives. This small book is the distillations of the lessons from their decades of research.
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