The readability comes at a price: some reductiveness is inevitable in a single-volume overview of a subject as complex as the 20th century, and many interesting countertrends and secondary figures had to be omitted-but not all that many. Thematically organized chapters present the century as a vivid narrative that sweeps from Mendelian genetics and Max Planck’s theory of electromagnetic radiation to the explosive emergence of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, from the Harlem Renaissance to the outbreak of WWII, from The Organization Man to multiculturalism and postcolonialism. A smart, lively, and astoundingly comprehensive panorama of practically every major European and American intellectual movement of the 20th century.Īrt journalist Watson ( Sotheby’s, 1998, etc.) offers a Hit Parade of political forces and personalities, discoveries and revolutions, modernism and postmodernism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |