The Culture of the Europeans [Hardcover]

As no-one has reviewed this book and I have just finished reading it I thought I would try to encourage others to buy this masterful book.

Let's not beat about the bush,this is a long book. A very long book. It has nearly 1400 pages of text without a single picture or illustration to hurry you along. As an aside, the hardbook edition falls into that uncomfortably too heavy to hold variety and I ended up reading this book propped up on the dining room table.

And I'm glad I did, because I found the book fascinating. This fascination was greatly facilitated by Sassoon's easy and fluent style. I won't say the pages flew by, it's not that kind of book, but it was never a book where three quarters of the way down the page I struggled to recall what I'd just been reading about. I think we all know those books.

So why read it ? Well if you have just a fleeting interest in the development of the European novel,newspapers,magazines,cinema,television, radio,clasical music and popular music then it is hard to conceive of a better place to start than this book. The detail is quite stunning. The major players in this narrative are initially the French and British with the shadow of the USA looming large over more or less the whole of the twentieth century. Along the way developments in Germany,Italy, Spain and Russia in particular are frequently aired. I didn't check but I'd imagine that most,if not all, European countries pop into the flow somewhere, but if you have a specialist interest in say the modern Latvian novel then obviously this is not the book for you. There had to be limits to what Sassoon could reasonably cover ! A great strength of the book is that all the time you come up against the fact that although some great artists transcend borders ( think Hugo, Beethoven, Agatha Christie ! etc ) there are always distinct national preferences at play and what makes it big in England doesn't necessarily do well in Italy. And, of course, vice versa. Sadly one of the recurrent themes of the book is how insular the English speaking countries are to the written cultures of other languages. This continues to this day where the UK and USA translate a minute amount of literature compared to other countries and similarily pop groups all over the world have had to sing in English if they want to gain international recognition.

I found Mr.Sassoon to be a very sympathetic and even-handed guide. There is no ranking of writers or composers here, but an attempt to explain what and who was popular in its day. Many of the names were unknown to me, which obviously makes you ponder as to the longevity of today's superstars. If they follow the pattern of so many examples in this book they will be consigned to the dustbin of history, to be resurrected no doubt someday by a twenty second century Sassoon-alike. I daresay we all have our favourites that we would willingly shove into the proverbial bin this very second !

The book finishes, as it should, with a consideration of the impact of modern technology.Here for instance,I was stunned to read that the computer game Grand Theft Auto grossed in the UK more than the latest Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films in 2004.As someone who has hardly ever played computer games I found this statistic incredible. Thankfully develoments on the net are too recent for Sassoon to stun us with similar data, but he does ponder the likely influence it might have in the future on our culture. So obviously the book deserves a review employing this most modern means of communication. And yes he does mention the influence of Amazon's home reviewers ! So I just hope Mr.Sassoon has a peek to see if his book has been reviewd and that if he does he enjoys this review.