Modern Times, Modern Places: How Life and Art Were Transformed in a Century of Revolution, Innovation, and Radical Change - Hardcover

Conrad, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037540113X ISBN 13: 9780375401138

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Synopsis

A celebrated critic explores the dramatic, rapidly changing history of the twentieth century, tracing the impact of science and technology on human life as revealed through the arts and examining the places and people that have represented successive frontiers of change, experimentation, and innovation. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

"The earth", said Gertrude Stein in 1938, "is not the same as in the 19th century". And how. Covering a staggeringly vast distance, Peter Conrad traces the development of modern consciousness as reflected in its art and thought, via Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, until he reaches the end of the 20th century--a dizzying point on the brink of a new millennium. He compares the progress to that of a human life, passing from youthful zest to maturity, but only by way of anguish and torment. This sounds simplistic; the book is not. Conrad's prose is as fluid as his ideas are sharp, and the scope of his reference is enviable, its application impeccable. This is intellectual writing at its most accessible. He considers Freud and Chaplin, Stravinsky and Einstein, as he pursues his theme of a planet that has shrunk as we have grown, to a size that we can manipulate and, as Hiroshima showed, we can destroy. Our greatest advances have been technological, he argues, yet at the expense of reducing the individualism of humankind, of "dumbing down" to a sedative senility. Wisely avoiding the business of prediction, his declaration of faith in laughter when facing the future, and in the reinterpretation of the past in order to escape it, provides a pleasantly unexpected conclusion. Arranged in 30 chapters, each a rounded essay in its own right, Modern Times, Modern Places is a powerfully evocative appraisal of the 20th century and its achievements, which succeeds where quite frankly many will fail. --David Vincent

About the Author:

Peter Conrad was born in Australia in 1948. He teaches English literature at Christ Church, Oxford, and is the author of more than a dozen books, including A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 037540113X
• ISBN 13: 9780375401138
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 752