A review by icallaci
Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson

3.0

Too broad, not enough depth. Although it covers a hundred years' worth of history, I came away feeling that I hadn't really learned anything new about most of the subjects. Part of it focuses heavily on the arts (dance, painting, music, theater, poetry), which I suppose are intellectual, but not what I was expecting. (And documenting the first commercial magazine to show pubic hair is not in my definition of intellectual at ALL.) Every once in a while I caught a glimmer of a possible explanation about why history played out the way it did (for example, socialism's popularity after the perceived failure of capitalism in the 1929 stock market crash), but none of these ideas was ever developed beyond a few sentences--and the sentences were scattered all over the book instead of in one place. I did enjoy the sections on physics, chemistry, genetics, mathematics, computers, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and others, but there were long stretches of the book where I almost gave up.