Customer Reviews

A Thread of Years

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author takes on an interesting challenge: to provide a short scene or story for each year beginning in 1900. After each setting, he has a discussion with his alter ego. The dialogue, especially with his alter ego are the highlight of the book. I would have given this book five stars except for a few weaknesses. The settings are over represented by Philadelphia and Budapest, perhaps using settings the author is most familiar with. The author promised to show the disintigration of culture from 1900 to 1969. I believe he failed to miss the mark. Better that he would have continued through to 2000, and in doing so make the point that corporate power has come full circle in a century. Finally, the disdain the author has for progressive and liberal thinking is abundantly clear, but no justification for this hatred is given.

John Lukacs' idea of illustrating the development of twentieth century American culture and history through a series of "vignettes" interspersed with commentaries must have made for a good proposal--were I a publisher, I'd snap it up, particularly because I have admired many of the other books written by this historian. Regrettably, Lukacs fails in this opus for a very simple reason: he is not a "literary" writer; Lukacs is an insightful historian, and his expository writing is excellent, but Lucaks is no story-teller. His vignettes are simply boring. The commentaries that separate these bits of "fiction"--written as an inner dialogue between Lukacs the historian and Lukacs the narrator (or various parts of Lukacs' complex mind, at any rate)--remains as unfocused and flat as the vignettes.

This might have been a much better book, had Lukacs collaborated with a talented writer of historical fiction. The storyteller could have written the vignettes, and Lukacs could have supplied the commentary. As it is, the book is a failed experiment (a failure Lukacs himself anticipates in his introduction to the work) best ignored in favor of this historian's many better books.

One of the most difficult themes: Americans in Europe, Europe in America. Very daring literary form of "vignettes" and some socratic dialogue. It is a success.

Professionally the facts and conslusions are what they should be, the author being a Yale professor.

This fro the point of view of an Northern European historian.