Stranger Than We Can Imagine
An Alternative History of the 20th Century
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The extraordinary story of the 20th century, as told from the furthest fringes of science, art and culture. For readers of Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Before 1900, history was an account of great discoveries that actually made sense. People understand innovations like the steam engine, agriculture, or electricity. The twentieth century, by contrast, gave us quantum entanglement, cubism, relativity, psychedelics, postmodernism, chaos maths, and the Somme.
This is the story of that confusing century as told through the ideas produced at the furthest fringes of our sciences, arts, and culture. Its cast includes well-known geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, and Pablo Picasso, lesser known geniuses like Edward Lorenz, Sergey Korolyov, or Shigeru Miyamoto, and infamous but influential ne'er-do-wells like Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley and Keith Richards. In this company we take a tour through ideas as strange as general relativity, DNA, the subconscious, Gaia theory, and Dada.
In this brilliantly written and original book, John Higgs explores, with great clarity and wit, the extremes of twentieth century thought, and in doing so shows how a world of empires became a world of individuals. You will never see the twentieth century in the same way again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marshaling an impressive array of subjects into a brisk and surprisingly cohesive cultural history of the "dark woods" of the 20th century, Higgs (KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds) explains what happened after the world lost its "omphalos" the ancient concept of the center of the universe. The 20th century's early milestones smashed many of the traditional frames of reference humans had: Einstein's theory of relativity demonstrated that time was not absolute, the decline of monarchies and the rise of democracy ended an age of absolute authority, and artistic Modernism embraced the limitations of relativist perspective and the freedom of nontraditional narrative. What arose, for better or worse, was a cult of the individual that began with occultist Aleister Crowley's imperative to "do what thou wilt," and eventually gave birth to totalitarianism and youth culture alike. Higgs affects a witty and casual tone, but his indictment of individualism, which he sees as a path to vapidness, nihilism, and commercialism, is rather severe. He does, however, find hope at the dawn of the 21st century, the age of the network, when multiple-model atheism and the Internet's quest for transparency can perhaps lead humanity out of the wreckage of the 20th century.
