We tend to look at our time as one of unparalled changes that have completely changed how we live. We also think this makes our time unique, but as this book makes clear, ours is not the first time progress and anexity have played such a heady part in the making of the times. This book covers the first 14 years of the 20th century, a time of great progress and inovation, but a time of great anexity as declining birth rates, changing sexual roles, and a world that felt to many as spining too fast created a time of promise and dread. The author seemes fixated on the sexual component, but overall manages to explain the period as it felt to the people who lived it without placing too much empthasis on how the events of the time affected the next 30 years. ( )

De jaren 1900-1914. De maatschappij uit die tijd bezien vanuit de gebeurtenissen toen, van vóór de wetenschap van een wereldoorlog. Boeiend om samenhang te zien tussen ontwikkelingen in de kunst, de wetenschap, de industrialiserende maatschappij, de zedelijke, politieke en filosofische ontwikkelingen in Engeland, Frankrijk, Duitsland, Rusland, Oosternrijk-Hongarije. Een sterke parallel met de ontwikkelingen die in de huidige tijd zichtbaar zijn dringt zich op, maar het boek is dan ook in déze tijd geschreven. ( )

Excellent history of the period, very down to earth. ( )

Attempting to write of Europe prior to World War I while adopting the pose that the Twentieth Century was an unwritten book, Blom's overarching response is that this was no "Belle Epoch" but a century that started out compromised. Compromised by its bewilderment that scientific rationality and economic development had produced incomprehensibility and social disorder. Compromised by how sexual relations previously constrained by convention and religion seemed to breaking down. Compromised by political leadership unable to recognize that there was a systemic crisis taking place and that even if there had been a general recognition it's unlikely that empty place holders such as the likes of Wilhelm of Germany, Franz Joseph of Austria or Nicholas of Russia could have been circumvented to provide answers. All of this leading to a flight to unreason as the avenue by which to relate to what could not be assimilated, which found a variety of expressions ranging from modern art to fascist politics to desperate throws of the geopolitical dice.

While I'm not really the person for whom this book was written, Blom writes with aplomb and wit and I greatly enjoyed his style. He also does nothing to assuage my own unease at the current state of things. As another generation of futurists noted (the "cyberpunk" writers such as William Gibson & Bruce Sterling) the future is unevenly distributed and the United States seems to be leaving the last time bubbles of 19th-century thinking with about as much grace as the European powers did. In my darkest moments I hope that we do not commemorate the centennial of 1914 with another Great Power war. ( )

Divided by year, but each year takes a thematic subject, usually provoked by an event of that year.

1900: France
1901: the aristocrats
1902: Austria-Hungary & Sigmund Freud
1903: science, especially physics
1904: Europeans in Africa; especially the Belgians in the Congo
1905: Russia
1906: the military
1907: the Bohemian fringe - pacifists, nudists, Mme. Blavatsky & friends
1908: "women with stones" - the Suffragettes
1909: machines and speed
1910: the arts
1911: popular culture
1912: eugenics
1913: crime and insanity
1914: summation

Due to its thematic nature, probably not the first book on the period I'd give someone - but possibly the second. ( )