Indeterminate Historian
At the End of an Age
by John Lukacs
New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002
(230 pages; $22.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Jay W. Richards
As a historian1 John Lukacs is in his God-given domain, blessed with that most desirable of traits: He notices crucial details that lesser historians either ignore or wander blindly past. He is expert at drawing out the risky details of history, at reminding us—or teaching us—that events now comfortably settled in the fixed past were once teetering contingencies. Much of what has happened didn’t have to happen. History, unlike much of natural science, is the domain of the unrepeatable and unpredictable.
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Jay W. Richards is vice president and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He is the author most recently of The Untamed God (InterVarsity, 2003) and co-author with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Regnery, 2004).
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