This book has come in for an enormous amount of criticism, but its
attackers have lost sight of the author's incredible ambition - a
chronicle of the most important ideas of the 20th century. Remember
this was a period when in just a few fields, the total sum of
knowledge was doubling every few years. Of course a lot had to be
left out, for example you will not find a discussion of Henry Ford
and his ground breaking assembly line, even though arguably mass
production is also one of the key shaping events of the 20th
century. While you could nitpick about what is an idea as opposed
to an event, in no other book I have encountered, does the author
display such an incredible even handed scholarship. He has
performed a unique service to any reader keen to quickly get up to
speed on the essentials of recent intellectual history, in an
entertaining way. Even the casual browser will rapidly achieve the
status of feared opponent in argument at any dinner party, or
muscular Radio 4 discussion programme. If you do not find something
of interest in this book, which ranges over practically the entire
gamut of hard and social science's lasting recent achievements,
then the lights are on, but no one is home. (Kirkus UK)
'Breathtakingly entertaining, endlessly instructive, irresistibly
enjoyable' THE TIMES 'A tour de force ... breathtaking' SPECTATOR
'A magnificent achievement' LITERARY REVIEW TERRIBLE BEAUTY
presents a unique narrative of the twentieth century. Unlike more
conventional histories, where the focus is on political events and
personalities, on wars, treaties and elections, this book
concentrates on the ideas that made the century so rich, rewarding
and provocative. Beginning with four seminal ideas which were
introduced in 1900 - the unconscious, the gene, the quantum and
Picasso's first paintings in Paris - the book brings together the
main areas of thought and juxtaposes the most original and
influential ideas of our time in an immensely readable narrative.
From the creation of plastic to Norman Mailer, from the discovery
of the 'Big Bang' to the Counterculture, from Relativity to Susan
Sontag, from Proust to Salman Rushdie, and Henri Bergson to Saul
Bellow, the book's range is encyclopaedic. We meet in these pages
the other twentieth century, the writers, the artists, the
scientists and philosophers who were not cowed by the political and
military disasters raging around them, and produced some of the
most amazing and rewarding ideas by which we live. Terrible Beauty,
endlessly stimulating and provocative, affirms that there was much
more to the twentieth century than war and genocide.
General
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