![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() van Loons), and made his two children the victims of his hypochondriacal self-deceptions, his ungovernable temper, and his restless migrations between Europe and America. Batted about like a tennis ball between his Boston blueblood mother and his titanic Dutch father, the younger van Loon suffered with and through the recurrent bouts of melancholia that plagued his father between books, drove him to three fractious marriages (and innumerable incipient Mrs. Nor will his reputation, personal or academic, be enhanced by this scrupulously researched, painfully intimate biography by his younger son, Gerard. has suffered an eclipse: in an age where scholarship is defined by the monograph, the works of van Loon, sweeping and grandiose, have necessarily suffered. Since his death in 1944, the popularity of Hendrik Willem van Loon, prolific historical popularizer (The Fall of the Dutch Republic, The Story of Mankind, Man the Miracle Worker), friend of Roosevelt, H. ![]()
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