Watson has achieved the near-impossible: a concise reference that is also intellectually compelling—and a fascinating read.
A smart, lively, and astoundingly comprehensive panorama of practically every major European and American intellectual movement of the 20th century.
Art journalist Watson (Sotheby’s, 1998, etc.) offers a Hit Parade of political forces and personalities, discoveries and revolutions, modernism and postmodernism. 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. 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. At times, the format necessitates flat, simplistic judgments, the kind that students quote trustingly. Watson announces unequivocally that the “six great philosophers” living at the turn of the century were Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Bendetto Croce, Edmund Husserl, William James, and Bertrand Russell—and that, as far as novelists are concerned, Saul Bellow will prove “the standard against which all others will be judged.” Yet far more controversial and problematic material (such as the human potential movements of the 1970s, deconstructionist philosophy, and the “canon wars” of the 1980s and 1990s) is handled with disarming subtlety and intelligence. Watson’s emphasis on European and American culture may eventually prove a more serious limitation if the demographics of the coming century shift the world's gaze to developments in Asia and Africa. Nonetheless, the sheer quantity of accurate, fair-minded information and thoughtful analysis results in an invaluable resource for at least the near future.
Watson has achieved the near-impossible: a concise reference that is also intellectually compelling—and a fascinating read.Pub Date: March 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019413-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
Hannah Arendt is one of the world's most profound political scientists: her scholarship is sterling, her philosophical- psychological insights staggering; two of her books Origins of Totalitariansim and Human Condition are among the few significant works in her field and our era. Whenever she publishes, it is an event. And although she is not at her best in this close study of the American and French revolutions and their meaning for the 20th century, still on every page we are in the presence of a mind of high individuality, great interest and intellectual integrity. It is her thesis that the Founding Fathers were faithful above all else to the ideal of freedom as the end and justification of revolution and thereby they assured its success. On the other hand, the Rousseau-Robespierre misalliance, the idea of the general will binding the many into the one, the transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of Sans-Culotte, not only ultimately led to the Reign of Terror but also the whole catalogue of post-1792 ideological corruptions. The malhcurcux became the enrages, then the Industrial Revolution's miserables. And the Marxist Leninist acceptance of the new absolutism, which was done in the name of historical necessity and the name of the proletariat as a "natural" force, subsequently absolved both tyranny and blood baths as stages along the way... A powerful indictment and illumination, both immediate and enduring.
Pub Date: March 15, 1963
ISBN: 0143039903
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1963
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