The Lessons of History by Will Durant
Published 1968 · 160 pages · 25,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy
How hard is The Lessons of History to read?
The Lessons of History scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Educated vocabulary. Classical references.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- High-level generalizations about human history.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Extreme compression. Every sentence distills decades of study.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Thirteen thematic chapters.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- History itself as a pattern to be decoded.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Wise, detached, slightly melancholic.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- History has no resolution; the Durants offer perspective.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Thirteen brief, self-contained chapters.
How The Lessons of History is regarded
The Lessons of History holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.