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Arnold Toynbee was one of the most remarkable thinkers of the 20th century, a man of far-reaching imagination, extraordinary erudition, and an infinite capacity for hard work. At the height of his fame, he was the most renowned scholar in the world, acclaimed as the author of the monumental, 10-volume A Study of History. Indeed, such was the regard for his Study that Time magazine, in a cover article on Toynbee published in 1947, declared that he had found history Ptolemaic and left it Copernican. In Arnold Toynbee: A Life, William H. McNeill weaves together Toynbee's intellectual accomplishments and the personal difficulties of his private life, providing both an intimate portrait of a leading thinker and a judicious evaluation of Toynbee's work and his legacy for the study of history. McNeill illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of A Study of History as well as the countless other works penned by this prolific writer, examining the responses of other historians (including the devastating attack mounted by Hugh Trevor Roper) and Toynbee's attempts to modify his Study to answer these criticisms. And McNeill also examines Toynbee's tormented personal life, including his troubled marriage to Rosalind Murray (the daughter of Gilbert Murray), and the suicide of his son Anthony. What emerges is both poignant and thought-provoking, a biography and a commentary about how history is written and how it should be pursued. William McNeill is one of America's most eminent historians, the winner of a National Book Award in 1964 for The Rise of the West, which The New York Times Book Review called the most learned...the most intelligent...the most stimulating and fascinating bookthat has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of the world. In this sympathetic portrait of a life both triumphant and troubled, McNeill brings his skills to bear on one of the greatest figures in his field, illuminating a career of rare accomplishment.

In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal mastery from the crossbow--banned by the Church in 1139 as too lethal for Christians to use against one another--to the nuclear missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears and, as McNeill hopes, a ground for wiser action. No summary can do justice to McNeill's intricate, encyclopedic treatment. . . . McNeill's erudition is stunning, as he moves easily from European to Chinese and Islamic cultures and from military and technological to socio-economic and political developments. The result is a grand synthesis of sweeping proportions and interdisciplinary character that tells us almost as much about the history of butter as the history of guns. . . . McNeill's larger accomplishment is to remind us that all humankind has a shared past and, particularly with regard to its choice of weapons and warfare, a shared stake in thefuture.--Stuart Rochester, Washington Post Book World Mr. McNeill's comprehensiveness and sensitivity do for the reader what Henry James said that Turgenev's conversation did for him: they suggest 'all sorts of valuable things.' This narrative of rationality applied to irrational purposes and of ingenuity cannibalizing itself is a work of clarity, which delineates mysteries. The greatest of them, to my mind, is why human beings have never learned to cherish their own species.--Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker