Showing posts with label intellectual history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intellectual history. Show all posts

Saturday, July 24, 2010

The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

The Modern Mind: An intellectual history of the 20th Century
Peter Watson
Perennial, London, 2001

Links:

Amazon
Wiki entry on the author


This work is a remarkable scholarly achievement. The author admits he cannot cover in detail all the relevant ideas of the last century yet he does an excellent job in providing the reader with a sweeping panorama of 20th century thought.

The writing is lucid and entertaining, though at times I found some of the material covered tedious. That is to be expected, a coverage of this extent is bound to leave the individual reader with pages tedious to read. That is not the author's fault, it is just a function of human behavior. This is a valulable text, one that should be read in its entirety and then kept handy as a reference source.