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A Terrible Beauty: A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind
 
 
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A Terrible Beauty: A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind (Hardcover)

by Peter Watson (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 847 pages
  • Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (26 Oct 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0297840754
  • ISBN-13: 978-0297840756
  • Product Dimensions: 25.5 x 18 x 4.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,070,691 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

In this extremely ambitious book, Peter Watson has achieved a noteworthy success. Weaving together so many ideas and so many people responsible for them, this story of the 20th century is both informative and stimulating. It unfolds in a way that captures the reader's attention and never relinquishes its grasp. The range of topics, from the arts and sciences through philosophy and ideas, renders this work a colossal and intricate chain of events. The links are cleverly interwoven between the century's unimaginable horrors and extraordinary developments. From the characters and events which shaped Vienna for the arrival of art student Adolf Hitler in 1907, to the ongoing conflicts of the computer age, Terrible Beauty, as its title implies, demonstrates the Jekyll and Hyde nature of modern civilisation. An excellent work of reference and an exciting read.


Product Description

All changed, changed utterly; A terrible beauty is born Easter 1916, W B Yeats 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 encyclopedic. 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.
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4.3 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing intellectual inter-leaving in narrative, 29 Jan 2001
By A Customer
If you are as interested in your ignorance of the world as I am then this book will demonstrate just how little you know about the world you think you know so much about. It is a heavy and at times forboding volume, but it is simply the most rewarding thing I have read in a long time.

If you are the kind of person who is often heard starting sentences, "I never realised until recently...", or, "Something I read the other day made me think...", then stop reading here and click on the "Buy this book" link. The range the author employs is nothing short of staggering - this is a history of the modern mind and covers everything you could wish to know about - but it is intensely readable.

Especially impressive here are the twists on history that give a heightened impression of what really matters; JFK's murder in dallas is mentioned only as a lead in to the groundswell that led to LBJ's welfare reforms and the emergence of the green movement; Neil Armstrong landing on the moon takes us to a long discussion on the space-race, evolutionary theory, archeology and theology. And it all hangs together superbly.

Although I am still blissfully ignorant of much of the world, having read this book I am at least better informed as to what I need to know more about.

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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A 20th century history of ideas/ developments in art/science, 2 Mar 2002
This is a magnificent book - a 20th century history of 'the people and ideas that shaped the modern mind.'It is not about wars,politics or governments, although these are, inevitably, in the background. The author describes,and discusses, developments through the century, in the arts - from music to photography, - the natural sciences - from anthropology to quarks -, the social sciences, philosophy, education and much else. The majority of the scene is the Western world, but other areas are not neglected.
The book is in 4 sections, each covering about a quarter of the century; 1' from Freud to Wittgenstein' 2)'from Spengler to Animal Farm', 3)'from Sartre to the Sea of Tranquility' and 4) 'from the counter culture to Kosovo'.The century opens with the stability and moral certainty of pre-1914 Europe, with Picasso, the unconscious,and natural selection;it ends with string theory, the genome project and post-modern, self-centered relativism.
Whatever age the reader may be, he/she will not fail to be entralled to discover the roots and origins of so much now taken for granted - for example, the wisdom of an Oxford Don, born in 1835,whose advice to the young William Beveridge, led later to the setting up of the British welfare state.Whether one's interest is the increasing power of science,the decline in tradition, the changes in the arts or simply the vast number of men and women, whose ideas and work have helped to bring about change - for good or bad(!),one will marvel at this book
Read - and be enthralled and educated.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars What you need to know about what you need to know, 13 April 2009
By John Ferngrove "Cirenor" (Hants UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind: A History (Paperback)
This is an outstanding accomplishment. A comprehensive intellectual history of the 20th Century such as this is something that has so needed to be done. Watson has managed to synthesise a vast number of the intellectual threads that characterised it, and demonstrated, somewhat, the fascinating pattern of their interaction and cross fertilisation. Of course, any reader with their own special interests is going to question whether some things that are not there should be, or whether too much emphasis has been placed on this or that current of ideas. They may disagree with how some of the ideas have been presented or interpreted. But all such criticisms miss the point and are, at worst, churlish. The thing is the man has provided a map for the ideas that have shaped one century, and provides the foundation for the new one upon which we now embark. The map might not be wholly complete, or wholly accurate. Indeed such a wholly complete or accurate map might not actually be possible, given the subjective aspect of some of the terrain. But it is a map on which any thinking person can build, and through which they might attempt to balance the biases of their own intellectual predelictions.

Thus for instance, I consider myself someone with a strong Scientific background and a good grounding in traditional philosophy. I would say I am a keen 'consumer' of Art but not really an informed critic. I do have a reasonably wide and deep knowledge of music. So these were the intellectual credentials that I bought to my reading of this book. On the other hand I have next to no comprehension of economic history, sociology and cultural criticism. I have broad tastes in literature and poetry but not this author's panoramic sweep. Thus I was able to comprehend an integrated intellectual pattern of ideas that were both familiar and unfamiliar to me, and discern relationships between them I could not have seen before. My science background enabled me to see that the author himself didn't always fully understand the ideas he was discussing, but this is again to miss the point. There are other books one may go to if one wants to add more detail to one's understanding of particular ideas. What you may not be able to find elsewhere is the cultural context in which ideas emerged and operated. My experience of the cultural criticism angle was particularly enlightening. I am one of those middle aged blokes who has long railed against the demise of high culture at the hands of the postmodernist barbarians, liberalism gone mad. However, my reading here has shown me that people cleverer than me have been thinking about these things for a long time, and that there are some far deeper aspects to these questions than I had thus far identified.

All in all this book is a hugely enriching experience that has set my reading agenda for a year or two to come. I have extended my Amazon reading wishlist to include works by or about: Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig, Hannah Arendt, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Pirandello, Jane Jacobs, David Harvey, Alasdair Macintyre, Saul Bellow, John Updike and Roger Scruton. Also, I shall be revisiting the works of; Richard Rorty, Allen Ginsberg and W.H.Auden

The reviewer who complains that a book of this type, that is intended to be encyclopaedic, contains too much, invites several flippant responses, not least of which is which ideas would they have liked the author to have left out?
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb Achievement
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