A Littlefield Adams quality paperback

"The essays in this little volume, published here for the first time in book form, were written by Bertrand Rusell during the Second World War. In those years the author was teaching philosophy at American universities and exercising a growing influence on America's student population. The essays assembled here are fundamentally concerned with the "art of reckoning" in the fields of mathematics, logic and philosophy. The simplicity of Russell's exposition is astonishing, as is his ability to get to the core of the great philosophical issues and to skillfully probe the depth of philosophical analysis."--Inside dust jacket.

Downs uses great books to write the cultural history of society. His thesis is that the economic, social, and political behavior of a region, a nation, or even the world is shaped largely by the printed word. Concentrating on twenty-five publications from John Smith's General History of Virginia (1624) to C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South (1951), he analyzes the impact of written history and sociology on the intellectual and social life of the South. - Publisher.