From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present by Jacques BarzunMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
For shocking erudition, this work deserves a 10/5, or 15/5--5/5 is too little. The sheer amount of learning is astounding. Incredible. Most of the time that I was reading this, I was marveling at the breadth of this man's knowledge, and how much writing--poetry, correspondence, history, novels, diaries, philosophy, drama, and everything else--he had read, digested, remembered, and could compare to other cultural objects. And how much art. And how much music. And every other scrap of cultural information. He is an encyclopedia of cultural information, and shares that knowledge while applying analysis and critique to all of it, and placing all of it in historical context, in the flow of ideas. He demonstrates more knowledge on a single page (and there are 800 of them) than I have gathered in my entire life. I don't think that's exaggeration, even though I take pride in knowing some things. It's crazy how much information he has at his fingertips.
But good god is it horrible to read.
Okay, not all of it. Any one page is pretty good. Some sections make for excellent reading, good information, something worth knowing. The best parts read like historical overviews, and those were the parts that kept me going. And in all honesty, his style is fine, his prose is clear, generally, and his command of the language is outstanding.
But it's like reading a 300,000-word meandering essay, looking for the thread, enduring a deep dive into the significance of thousands of particles of culture, some of them famous works by well-known men and women, but many, many of them virtually unknown or forgotten works by obscure historical figures. "Who cares?" was a frequent thought, though it is admittedly an irrational and unfair critique of a work nobody forced me to read. I suppose I kept hoping he would get back to things I cared about, which he did here and there. I had expected to find this a popularization of cultural history for the lay reader, but it's not that.
He writes as a critic, so while it's right that he give his opinion, it dominates the work. This book is filled with so many generalizations and unsupported opinions that you could assign an entire class unique research projects based on the assertions he makes over just one or two pages. He could, for all I know, be right about damn near everything, if you can call an opinion right or wrong, but who wants to read all of the lesser correspondence of a minor 17C playwright to see if what he says about it is accurate? (For example.)
Thus, 3/5 star. In my opinion. A towering accomplishment, but a drag--a great deal of value wrapped up in a whole lot of cripplingly dull obscurity. His theoretical, perfect audience might love this work, and rave, and demand all the stars, but that's true of every author's writing, right? Just find the right audience!
And the last bit, his critique of the late 20C, reads like every old-man rant you've ever heard--against TV, public schools, fast food, students rating professors, the internet, modern journalism, sports, non-traditional families, and many other topics. He handled the years 1500-1950 with cool detachment and impartiality, but 1950-2000, the "Get off my lawn!" years, are mainly responsible for the "decadence" part of the title. It's unfortunate that it's where the book ends, because it colors how I read everything else he wrote.
This work is impressive in many ways, particularly its scholarship, but I can't recommend it. It's a long, dry read, with widely-separated moments of interesting commentary. This is clearly meant for cultural historians and intellectuals, and maybe smart-looking bookshelves, where I'm going to put it now and pretend like I understood everything....
Oh, apparently Jacques Barzun enjoyed baseball and detective novels. I'm glad to know that.
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