Van Loon’s Lives – Hendrik Willem van Loon

Description

Van Loon’s Lives: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as dinner guests in a bygone year.

Loosely based on the classical Plutarch’s Lives, it recounts the biographies of various famous historical characters, and like Plutarch often pairing together characters from different times and places whose life, careers or personalities seemed to Van Loon to bear a similarity to each other (e.g. William the Silent and George Washington who led the Wars of Independence of their respective countries; the philosophers Descartes and Emerson; Empress Theodora of Byzantium and Queen Elizabeth I of England; Torquemada and Robespierre, of both of whom Van Loon had less than a flattering view…).

Price: R250.00

Edition: Reprint

Published: 1947

Publishers: George G. Harrap

Condition: Hardcover in good condition – Shelf wear at the top and bottom of the cover and spine. Very light foxing on the end-papers, otherwise internally in very good condition – clean and tightly bound. Dust jacket in very poor condition.