From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present

"[This book] is certainly a great achievement. Encyclopedic without being discontinuous, the book hardly seems as long, as carefully constructed or as densely packed as it is. Though the ideas it explains are often complicated, the explanations it offers are limpidly clear, sparkling with biographical anecdote and counter-canonical observations, entirely free of those deserts of abstraction unrelieved by example often found in works of cultural theory."Jacques Barzun is the author of 'From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present', published 2001 under ISBN 9780060928834 and ISBN 0060928832.