Customer Reviews

The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age

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Randall's book, written in 1940 as a college survey textbook, is a remarkable Eurocentric history, not only for its breadth of knowledge and depth of analysis. By freely expressing his opinions, the author enlivens the narrative, but his opinions are so judicious and even-handed that he never alienates the reader. He turns the history that I learned in school upside-down; here there are no warriors or kings to leave their mark, but rather the philosophers and the scientists create new vistas, and those creations that further the enrichment of the pre-WW II middle class endure. A warning: Randall presupposes in the reader a liberal familiarity with history, philosophy, and literature that probably very few college students of the 1990s have attained. A bonus of the book, though, is the mellifluous prose and the exquisite analogies, the best that I've read in a history since Gibbon. For example, the Old Testament "is a stern and austere code, more ready to burst into the flame of indignation than the warm glow of love." (page 42)

A wonderfully eloquant review of the "modern" mind's evolution from its barbarous Judeo-Christian beginnings up until the industrial age. Makes powerful arguments for science's positive efffects upon man(as well as being historically and technically acurate), as well as questioning the negative effect it has had on man's morals and reason. A good read for someone out there lost amidst the multimedia education of hyperactive universities, just looking for a articulate lesson in man's chaotic growth. If you can find the time to read all seven hundred pages, do so at all costs.

Amazing! There's no better way to describe it. Of the five books composing this volume, four are absolutely superb. The fifth misses only in the sense that it was written 60 years ago. Were Randall writing today, that part would be much modified and probably expanded into a sixth book.

There are prerequisites for reading this work, the main one being considerable knowledge of Western History from the 13th Century onwards. For those who have that knowledge already, then this book is a marvelous adventure--thoughful, insightful and truly an intriguing explanation for why we are what we are today.

"... a book of that rare sort which can lay the foundations for another man's intellectual career", wrote Jacques Barzun in his Forward as invitation for the inquiring mind to have patience in reading this weighty volume. He boldly reassures the new reader that his/her encounter will be "an opportunity for self-development, and a source of life-long gratitude". Who is this Jacques Barzun? and why so much flattery for a book? It is only after justifiably granting this book permanent residency in our libraries that we can fully appreciate the extent of Barzun's admiration. It is by familiar encounters with this book which renew our sense of history, and the history of ideas, that we see more clearly what is in our heads. And what more pleasant way to be inspired by and infused with the historical spirit than to indulge in the captivating and coherent flow of Randall's eloquence?