Book Review: Modern Times by Paul Johnson
Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s really hard to evaluate current history well. This history started off strong. I loved how Johnson was able to synthesize science, literature, economics, and more and cast an atmosphere around the events at the beginning of the twentieth century. So much of what was described was aligned with my understanding of the events and times and he gave them some added context with his wide-reaching, interdisciplinary approach.
I love that he covered world-wide events – Africa, Asia, South America, Europe. He discussed organizations and events, especially post WWII, that I had little to no understanding of – whether a cursory “I’ve heard of that” to a “I’ve never heard of that person/event/thing.” Whether it was Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Peron, or Pinochet, I now have a better idea of what they did and how they came to power.
Johnson spent a lot of time on the “Will to Power” and how that rarely turned out well for the people on whom it was exercised.
I think my concerns came from a few places. First, there was a lot of confirmation bias. I tend toward small-government conservativism/libertarianism. Johnson doesn’t make me want to turn back from that. But I was, perhaps, a little too in agreement with much of this book. I was born in the early 1970s, so was less familiar with the details of the last chapters of Modern Times through either experience or study (we never got to Vietnam, for instance, in my education history classes). But, his take that communism & socialism are bad, totalitarianism is bad, freedom is good … I’m all on board.
Second, and not minorly, the history that has occurred in my memory has not worked out in the 40+ years post Modern Times … his optimism, it turns out, seems a little misplaced. Sure, there have been things like the fall of the USSR and Berlin Wall, reunification of Germany, etc. … I did not find his analysis at the end of the book as clear-eyed and impersonal as at the beginning. It almost couldn’t be.
I did appreciate the craft; bookending with scientific discoveries and advancements that had the potential to change everything. The writing was engaging and storytelling quite good. He was able to synthesize many streams of human endeavor into a compelling tale; the end, though, was less synthetic and more analytic and I wonder if that’s where he went off-track. Still. 4 Stars. Worth the time. Nadia May (who pronounces her first name with a long A – who new?) was, as always, a delight.
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