The world has changed faster during the 20th century than ever before. All our previous assumptions about God, our social, economic and political structures, science and technology, and - by extension - ourselves and our culture have been utterly transformed. The 20th century is the century that dared to question everything and its progress is told in this tour de force. "Modern Times" are explored through the cultural expressions - in art, in literature, in music - of the true conviction that we have lived through an unprecedentedly testing period in human experience. "Modern Places" are the locations that became the frontiers of modernity - cities like Vienna, Moscow, Paris and Berlin, new worlds in the Americas, and a preview of a possible future in Moscow. Did it all happen too fast and go too far? Modernity was like a rollercoaster ride, during which the human race jested with disaster and delighted in the havoc created by the play of g-forces. But despite the dangers that were unleashed along the way, with the clear perspective Peter Conrad provides on a phase of history that has nearly passed, we are much the better prepared to confront the new millennium. By making sense of our immediate past, this book aims to take us forward into the 21st century.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com 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 during the 20th century through the art and thought of Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo. 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 vast, its application unassailable. 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. Society's 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 that succeeds, quite frankly, where many will fail. --David Vincent --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Examining art as evidence of the massive changes in human society during this most hectic of centuries rather than as a subject in itself, Conrad has organized this herculean project into thematic, almost free-standing essays. The nuclear bomb is for him the emblem, the "equivocal triumph," of modernity, an age that both "took the world to pieces" scientifically and redefined suicide as a heroically defiant gesture. Conrad's narrative moves from European cultural capitals at their peaks to America after WWII, traveling eastward only at the book's end. When dealing with European modernist arts, Conrad is at his best, capturing elusive issues with apt phrasing and lucidity even when drawing on academic studies. Still, at times he opts for superficial, if provocative soundbytes, as the subject changes every few pages. This problem worsens as Conrad approaches the present: in a lazily dismissive paragraph, for instance, he trivializes a series of Cindy Sherman photographs as a "woman rehearsing and exhausting our shared quota of cultural stereotypes." Attending to jazz more closely also could only have benefited his discussion. Part of the trouble is that Conrad's tastes are unrepentantly highbrow, which ill serves an era of postmodern repetition and lowering standards. While attempting to understand what "it has meant to be alive in the twentieth century," he uses the first-person plural throughoutAsuggesting a wistful fantasy that his elite reader represents all of humankind. But many aspects of the multifaceted modernity he describes don't exist even for many in the first world. Read as a sweeping intellectual autobiography, from the viewpoint of an idiosyncratic "I," however, the book becomes a deeply compelling study, and a highly engaging feat of scholarship.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a positively encyclopaedic reference on modernism,
By A Customer
This review is from: Modern Times, Modern Places (Hardcover)
This book is exactly what those studying modernity needed--a thoughtful, unpretentious look at art and culture from the turn of the century through the present. Extremely accessible and highly supplementary to art and lit classes, Modern Times, Modern Places does an excellent job at orienting and contextualizing what has come to be called "modern art." 5 stars to Peter Conrad for accomplishing such an ambitious project with aplomb.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Wonderful Roller Coaster Survey of Modernism,
By Edward Garea "Edward Garea" (Branchville, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Modern Times, Modern Places (Hardcover)
Other reviewers of this book have missed the point completely. A survey must do two things for the reader: (1) Be entertaining; and (2) Introduce the reader to original sources he or she may have missed along the way.On both points Conrad hits the target with near perfection. He has written a survey that not only is impossible to put down, but also does a splendid job of steering the reader to those original works that comprise the background for the survey. Conrad uses a unique approach in viewing Modernism through the prism of art, rather than taking the standard approach via science or history, giving his book a novelty missing in many others of its kind. It is also refreshing to note that he does not take the obligatory Post-Modern stand in relation to his material that now seems de rigeur among the squirrels of Academia. The only reason I cannot give the book a fifth star is dur to Conrad's omission of one of the most important American cartographers of Modernism and its roots in Technology: Lewis Mumford. The inclusion of Mumford would have given Conrad's book the continuity it needs with the previous centuries rather than seeing the 20th century as a break with the past. By the way, as with most survey books, wait for the paperback, because if my experience with this tome is any indication, you'll be buying plenty of original sources you missed before.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wide-open survey of modernism,
By A Customer
This review is from: Modern Times, Modern Places (Hardcover)
Mr. Conrad takes on quite a task here: commenting on every aspect of what is called modern life and how it is reflected in this century's art. He does as good a job as anyone could, I think. I'm particularly glad that his analyses are relatively uncontaminated by the silly notions of Deconstructionism. Also, as some of the professional critics have said, he leaves out most of the silly, self-important, esoteric lingo of the current academic scene.
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