The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century
By Peter Watson
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About this ebook
From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.
Peter Watson
<p>Peter Watson has been a senioreditor at the London <em>Sunday Times</em>, a New York correspondentof the <em>London Times</em>, a columnist for theLondon <em>Observer</em>, and a contributor to the <em>New YorkTimes</em>. He has published three exposés on the world ofart and antiquities, and is the author of several booksof cultural and intellectual history. From 1997 to 2007he was a research associate at the McDonald Institutefor Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.He lives in London.</p>
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Reviews for The Modern Mind
50 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Een kanjer van een boek, na 20 blz dacht ik dat ik er nooit door zou komen: het is een encyclopedische opeenstapeling van vooral heel bekende namen, zonder veel lijn. Maar ik heb toch doorgezet en na 3 maanden zwoegen, moet ik toch zeggen: hoed af voor de eruditie van Watson! Vooral het laatste deel is verdienstelijk, omdat het orde schept in de cultuurproductie van de laatste decennia van de twintigste eeuw. Blijft wel de terechte kritiek dat er geen echte lijn zit in het verhaal. Watson zelf geeft in zijn inleiding wel als rode draad de echte doorbraak van het wetenschappelijke denken. Dat is zeker waar, maar het wordt in het boek zelf toch maar zijdelings aangebracht. Het grootste verwijt aan Watson is dat hij zich beperkt tot het westerse denken; in het licht van 11 september 2001 is het bijvoorbeeld onbegrijpelijk dat hij de ontwikkelingen in de islam niet aan bod laat komen.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A beast of a book. I spent a month happily browsing this man's extraordinary knowledge and reading about 750 pages. In areas where I have some knowledge, he is quite good. His handle on the WWI poets and the post WWll foreign movies is excellent, He introduced me to many scientists and their effects on our lives.He is absolutely correct in dismissing Freud and Marx.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Een kanjer van een boek, na 20 blz dacht ik dat ik er nooit door zou komen: het is een encyclopedische opeenstapeling van vooral heel bekende namen, zonder veel lijn. Maar ik heb toch doorgezet en na 3 maanden zwoegen, moet ik toch zeggen: hoed af voor de eruditie van Watson! Vooral het laatste deel is verdienstelijk, omdat het orde schept in de cultuurproductie van de laatste decennia van de twintigste eeuw. Blijft wel de terechte kritiek dat er geen echte lijn zit in het verhaal. Watson zelf geeft in zijn inleiding wel als rode draad de echte doorbraak van het wetenschappelijke denken. Dat is zeker waar, maar het wordt in het boek zelf toch maar zijdelings aangebracht. Het grootste verwijt aan Watson is dat hij zich beperkt tot het westerse denken; in het licht van 11 september 2001 is het bijvoorbeeld onbegrijpelijk dat hij de ontwikkelingen in de islam niet aan bod laat komen.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Imagine a book that gives a paragraph to every person in the 20th Century. Or at least to everyone who got his name in the news for more than a day: scientists, writers, philosophers, artists, you name it. All are here in this fatboy of a book weighing in at 800 plus pages.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A marvelous intellectual history of the 20th century. Amazingly he gets it right: Marx and Freud have nothing to say to us.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved reading this account of art, music, literature, science, and society across the 20th century. Watson finds that the idea of evolution perhaps had the single greatest impact on 20th century thought. On the down side, one can often judge such broad-ranging books by what they say about your own areas of expertise, which in my case is economics, and I found Watson's account of economic ideas to be rather dated and with gaping holes in the historical account.