Review by nnikif - Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

A review by nnikif
Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century by John Higgs

4.0

The book purports to tell some sort of a "hidden history of the 20th century". Actually, with the exception of the rather needlessly long description of the occult obsessions of the US space pioneer Jack Parsons, it's filled with the most familiar themes and characters: Aleister Crowley, Ayn Rand, Freud & Jung, Einstein, Duchamp's urinal, The Rite of Spring riot, Gödel's theorem, Schrödinger's cat, Mandelbrot set, V-2 rocket, Joseph Campbell & Star Wars, sexual revolution & feminism, personhood of the corporations, butterfly effect, feedback loops, neopaganism and selfie epidemic. Rather than going for the unfamiliar, it uses the familiar to construct a Grand Theory of the 20th Century — which is brief, simple and surprisingly coherent. The really strong point of the book is the way it sees 20th century as a foreign country, where things were done differently: it is useful to understand the ways and customs of this country, but one has to accept the fact that it's no longer reachable, that it's time to say goodbye and stop obsessing over the trivia that is rather meaningless in the larger scheme of things.

A review by nnikif Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century by John Higgs

A review by nnikif
Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century by John Higgs