The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 (original 2008; edition 2010)

Divided by year, but each year takes a thematic subject, usually provoked by an event of that year.

1900: France
1901: the aristocrats
1902: Austria-Hungary & Sigmund Freud
1903: science, especially physics
1904: Europeans in Africa; especially the Belgians in the Congo
1905: Russia
1906: the military
1907: the Bohemian fringe - pacifists, nudists, Mme. Blavatsky & friends
1908: "women with stones" - the Suffragettes
1909: machines and speed
1910: the arts
1911: popular culture
1912: eugenics
1913: crime and insanity
1914: summation

Due to its thematic nature, probably not the first book on the period I'd give someone - but possibly the second. ( )

"The Vertigo Years," much like Blom's earlier "Wicked Company," is a history for the general reader who wants to gain a feel for the general Zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle Western Europe coming up through the beginning of World War I. If you desire a history of something specifically with "the events leading up to WWI" in mind, keep looking, as this book has almost nothing to do with the complicated set of alliances and feuds that eventually resulted in the death of Archduke Ferdinand. It is, in the purest sense of the term, cultural history. Almost anything and anyone of significant (and many things of insignificant) amounts of cultural relevance are described in the book, but at 400 pages, Blom never grows ponderous. The chapters on Marie and Pierre Curie are just detailed enough to where almost everyone learns something new. And many of the chapters are wholly based around people or events with which I had little or no familiarity, like the political assassin and wife of the former French Prime Minister Henriette Caillaux, as well as the influence of Bertha von Suttner, the peace activist and first woman to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.

There are fifteen chapters in the book, each covering one year beginning in 1900 and ending in 1914. Instead of trying to write the history of each individual year (which would probably read much more confusedly and frenetically), Blom introduces each year with one seminal person, event, or idea with a striking vignette and uses the rest of the chapter to both branch out and go into some of the finer details of what's really going on. Some of the most wonderful chapters include the ones on the 1900 World Fair in Paris, Freud's revolutionary idea of "culture as sublimated sexuality," and the journalists who broke the story about King Leopold's atrocities in the Congo. Interspersed through the text are wonderful black-and-white photographs, with quite a few color plate photographs in the middle for visual reference to the varied artists Blom alludes to, everyone from Schiele to Picasso to Derain.

For those who have read Blom's "Wicked Company," this book is much, much better. None of the characters here seem to incur the author's ire like Rousseau does. And while "Wicked Company" is almost a multiple biography of half a dozen characters or more covering a very wide swath of a century or more, this is book is a set of tightly controlled, engaging bits of history with which we should all be familiar. It comes highly recommended for anyone with an interest in turn-of-the-century science, art, literature, technology, and society, and politics. ( )

One of the best background readings to the causation of WW1 ( )

This is a book, by a German-born author, which discusses what happened in some aspects of European life during the years indicated. Much is intellectual history, some of which was of interest and some of which was not. The accounts of actual happenings, such as the 1905 revoluiton in Russia and of thefight for women's suffrage in Britain was of interest, but more time was spent analyzing what happened than telling what happened. The book explicitly does not consider events in the light of the First World War. Not without interest, but often not highly interesting. ( )

A wonderfully rich book about the 'golden' decade and a half before the First World War.

If you enjoy reading history, this is a wonderful read. Each chapter starts with a thematic event, but his overall synthesis of ideas encompassing many different facets of this decade, including the emergence of feminism and suffragettes, modernism in art and literature, eugenics, the Boer War, the horrors of the Congo, the rise of the machine, and the change in world order of power. Machines, speed, feminism and sex are the overriding themes which make the period so vertiginous.

Blom is a gifted writer who entertains as he informs. His overriding thesis is that all the major sociological and political changes of the coming century are foreshadowed in this decade, despite the commonly held view (by me at least) that this was a glorious age of contentment and stability before a tumultuous thirty years ahead. Wow, was I wrong about that.

(I did not know that England was one of the last countries to allow woman full voting power in the 1920s, and that the last forced sterilization of a person was performed in 1983 in Oregon!) ( )