Rating: 
Summary: As good as advertised.
Review: For a subject matter as broad as this -- a 500-year story of Western Culture that includes descriptions and critiques of just about every field of art and science -- a very good work could have been produced in three volumes that would have intimidated even the most enthusiastic reader into submission. One of the many feats Barzun has done in this book is to compress this subject matter into 800 pages, and a very readable and unified 800 pages at that. (The devices he uses are described in the short "Author's Note".) If you want a one-stop source to gain a foundation in learning about the Western world, you can't go wrong with this book.Not many professional historians could pull this kind of book off. Because it is the narrative of one person and not an encyclopedic description of every phenomenon, a level of trust is necessary due to the author's selectivity. (And Barzun does highlight some figures whom he says that the majority of historians have not given the proper attention.) But Barzun's explicitness of this fact at the beginning of the book, as well as the respect he has been given by his peers, it's a safe bet to trust his sincerity, even if you might not agree with his assessment on this or that point. Although this is a story of "isms" more than about the individuals who brought them to life, Barzun does a good job of mixing the format in which the stories are told. A few chapters are told from the perspective of a city in a certain era (Chicago in 1895, for example). Some portions are told in the form of biographies of particular individuals. In other sections, Barzun surveys the various fields (literature, poetry, music, techne, etc.) to describe their progress. The reading doesn't get monotonous from any overused pattern. But what's especially helpful is that Barzun highlights a few special "isms" that occur and recur throughout the book (and in the spirit of avoiding overexplanation, uses capital letters to stick it out from the text). It sets out meta-themes that help the reader better appreciate some unified explanation running throughout the book. As far as the alluring title goes, Barzun explains early on that the term "decadence" implies less a moral failing and more of a cultural falling off -- meaning that artistic and cultural development and innovation has wound its course, and the "isms" of an earlier time no longer have the broad appeal that they did in their prime. With nothing new arising to captivate the Western mind in such a way, the cultural unity of the West has been and will continue to split off into something different. I'd recommend this book for both the general fan of history, as well as for any college student pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree. While it won't tell you everything you need to know, this book should help put some of the primary reading material in its broader context, even if you may not be as resigned as Barzun to write the eulogy for the West.
Rating:
Summary: Deserving of 10 stars
Review: I have not grabbed the highlighter and the page tabs for so long that I had to take one from my husband's supply of new highlighters -- and that highlighter had to be replaced with another before I was finished with this book. Mr. Barzun's style of writing and insights into how the past ties into the present are a breath of fresh air. No revisionism here! Everything ties together in a nice neat package! I was wishing the book had been available in the 1970s and 1980s when I was taking Western Culture in the university. As much as I admire the professor I had for that subject (and he wrote the book we used for the course), I wish this had been the text instead. Regardless of what some of those who disliked the book have written, the book is very understandable, the themes are easy to follow, and it is very clear that no one has had an original idea in his/her head since 1914. I especially liked the occasional "Digression on a Word," which he used to explain the usage of words that we today have taken umbrage with (for example, the word "Man." I recommend this book to any and all!
Rating:
Summary: A magnum opus in every sense of the term
Review: Quite simply the best book on the social "sciences" I have ever read (and Barzun would agree with the use of the quotation marks). Every thinking person should read this,and reflect. The last section alone, on the development of trends during the 20th century, is worth reading for insight into how we have ended up in the mess we are in. In fact, Amazon ought to give this book away free, so likely is the intelligent reader to order more books of Barzun's and on his recommendations of other authors in this work. Few authors have the gamut and depth of knowledge Barzun has. When asked how long it took him to write it, he reportedly replied "a lifetime"...which has been quite long. People whose names you encountered in school are brought to life, explicated, and the common errors in the way they are perceived corrected. I have highlighted pithy and insightful sentences on almost every other page of my copy, and I plan to follow up on many of the leads he gives to more information. Every reader will have personal favorites, but here are a few that struck me: "Revolutions paradoxically begin by promising freedom and then turn coercive and 'puritanical,' to save themselves from both discredit and reaction." "Wisdom lies not in choosing between them [the heart and the mind],but in knowing their place and limits." "After the age-long struggle for the vote, democratic countries show an extraordinary attitude toward it: they boast of their form of government and express nothing by comtempt for politicians--the men and women they have themselves chosen." "To the philosophical mind, the new marvel [trains] caused only sad reflection that moving from place to place added nothing to intellectual or spiritual worth." "Something in industrialized civilization seemed to be too much for the steadily alert mind to bear." "...a new form of superstition--popular psychology..." "Sports were the last refuge of patriotism." "Scholarship was the pretentious garbed in the unintelligible." "...when in time wealth and rank no longer correspond to merit, the disparity becomes an injustice and leads to instability." I could go on, but instead, get the book and read it.
Rating: 
Summary: From yawn to somnolence
Review: On page 753 of this book we meet a James Agate. We read some titbits on his finances, domestic arrangements and even the pronunciation of his name (which he preferred "to rhyme with hay-gate" whereas his acquaintances chose to say "Ay-git"). This is the kind of side-tracking Jacques Barzun revels in. It doesn't contribute a thing to your understanding of western cultural history - rather, it's a waste of space in a book that ambitiously intends to cover science, literature, art, music and philosophy from 1500 to the present. Equally typical is the ubiquitous negation of accepted lore, concepts and words. As a title, "The Corrections" would have fitted this book better than the soporific novel now bearing it. A random perusal will learn that "utopia" ought to be "eutopia"; technics should be called "techne"; we say democratic when we mean "demotic"; abstract art isn't abstract; pointillists applied dashes, not dots; Louis XIV never said "L'état, c'est moi"; Rousseau never urged anybody to go "back to nature"; evolution was not thought up by Darwin; and Jeanne was called Darc, not d'Arc. Barzun doggedly sticks to his amendments. To indicate the peculiar fusion of the rational and the emotional which in his view defines Romanticism, he insists on using a Chinese term, "heart-and-mind". He then goes on to use this horrible hybrid on every page, which soon becomes irksome: the originality of a book like this ought to be in a compelling vision, not in such innocuous niceties.
Surprisingly, Barzun loves pointing out pedantry in OTHERS - we are reminded of the pot and the kettle. This may be merely annoying, but things turn downright painful where he gets his facts wrong: as when he claims that the Crystal Palace was built by a sir James Parton, even though the attribution to sir Joseph Paxton seems fairly well established. Such errors reinforce the impression that Barzun jotted his text down at random, from memory. In his attempt to be a universal scholar he inevitably exposes the areas where he is not an expert. He delivers some blatant nonsense on music. He implies that the 'horizontal' polyphonists were not interested in 'vertical' harmony, even though the whole art of counterpoint consists in creating parallel melodic lines that sound harmonious together! He declares that the advent of the fortepiano has produced a century of badly orchestrated (the word ought to be "instrumented" by the way, B. thinks) music: the century of brilliant orchestrators like Beethoven, Berlioz, and Mahler, that is. Equally astounding is the claim that Schoenberg single-handedly saved serious music in the 20th century, even though by the end of that century serialism was obsolete and tonality in full swing again.
The final chapters of the book complete its undoing. At last Barzun shows his hidden agenda. He lashes out at contemporary culture as any upper middle class reactionary might do. There is nothing scholarly about it. Western decadence, it turns out, amounts to such horrors as people not wearing ties when going to the opera, or men failing to open doors for women. Understandably, Barzun also feels deeply for the lamentable professor who can no longer trust to inspire awe simply because he IS a professor. Further atrocities include children watching too much TV, and an excess of nudity. Barzun conveniently ignores the fact that the habit of plastering public and private spaces, even churches, with nudes, started in the Renaissance. The only difference seems to be that we no longer need artistic and mythological apologies for displaying nudity, which in itself has proved perennially fascinating. Similarly, Barzun bewails the violence of our times, forgetting that former centuries were in many ways far more brutal; we might be rather glad that most of present-day violence is 'virtual', as opposed to whole villages routinely watching people being burned alive by way of a Sunday outing. The shifts not in phenomena, but in their evaluation, marks the shift from "dawn" to "decadence", and as Barzun fails to underpin his evaluative shift, his entire project falters.
The lack of narrative coherence is no help either. Barzun succumbs to the lure of what DVD-land calls "special features". His text is dotted with patronizing suggestions of "books to read". Apart from inducing the feeling that the real substance is elsewhere, I wonder why we should take Barzun's word for it. Simply because he is a professor? Has he really read ALL books on every subject, that he can so confidently recommend a single one? The system of internal cross-references is pointless: if a theme is addressed that recurs elsewhere in the book, the author indicates those pages. As the average page has two or three of such 'hyperlinks', tracking them would have you criss-crossing through the book constantly, at the very real risk of driving you mad, and usually only to find that the indicated pages don't add anything of substance on the subject. Page margins are broken up by citations from historical figures that struck me as fairly random and totally dispensable. Continuity is further uprooted by "digressions on a word" and by intermediate chapters headed "The view from (a certain place) around (a certain year)". Thus the reader's attention is constantly bounced to and fro, so it's no wonder you loose track of the author's point (if, in fact, there is any). Chapter headings do not correspond in any particular way to chapter content. The "View from Weimar around 1750" for instance, is mainly about America, as if the main concern of a Weimar burgher were the USA! Even chronology hasn't been a guiding principle: Barzun skips across the centuries as friskily as Marty McFly in his DeLorean.
On page 653 Barzun observes that the modern popularizing historian will often produce but a 'catchy recital without the life-giving ingredient of vision'. Ironically, this would be a perfect description of his own book, if it weren't for the 'catchy' part...
Rating:
Summary: A great Cultural History
Review: Although Barzun is somewhat more of a cultural elitist, this book is a great intro to western high culture. I found it well worth reading and the ideas it opened up to me make it worth reading by all. This book is a survey of such a fruitful period and such a long period that not much time is spent on any individual topic, but Barzun makes up for this in hilighting certain trends that pervade western high culture throughout, in his view. Very enjoyable.
Rating: 
Summary: Value? I want to make money!
Review: I would have given this book 4 stars as I found Barzun's coverage of the first 400 years of western life to be quite illuminating. Like previous reviewers I have to take a star off for sloppy editing. I originaly thought that Barzun was trying to make a point about how there is too much emphasis on grammer and how 'Perfection increases as inspiration decreases'p.74. Some of the mistakes can be quite unintentionaly amusing, for instance the constant mis-spelling of the word 'rhyming' by the word 'riming'. But major gaffs such as 'when its sequel (WWII) broke out in 1940' and 'The East Timorese nearly destroyed Indonesia' shows not just a lack of knowledge about history but also of current affairs. When Barzun bemoans the rise in the crime rate and in the prison population, he is talking largely about an American problem. Crime rates in Canada are significantly lower and the UK and the Irish Republic manage to maintain largely unarmed police forces. Something we could hardly do if we suffered from epidemic bouts of criminal activity. Then there's the laughable assertion that in the 19th century, crime was a rather jovial affair where cops and criminals knew each other, playing a high stakes game and 'killing had a clear motive'p.696. Just look around the world today and you'll see that killing has never had so many clear motives. Terrorists don't suffer from a Freudian death wish or notions about the 'absurdity' of the human condition. Most of Barzun's laments about the decline of Western culture seem to be focused entirely on the rise of the welfare state and the 'Great Switch' from liberalism. The doctrine of which is the best government is that which governs least. However when it comes to geography and population Barzun makes a great switch to the opposing view, the best government is that which governs most! For him the current vogue of independant cultural identities seeking independant political states is a thorn in the side of the idea of developing a common culture. Yet for the first 350 years of the period covered we are talking about the culture of mainly propertied white males. Nothing wrong with that, propertied white males have done more than any other minority to shape the world we live in today. But they are just that, a minority. Once the seeds of education have spread worldwide, there is no reason why a working-class black woman should not demand to frame the world through her experience and on her terms just as much as a propertied white male does. Barzun seems annoyed that the idea of EMANCIPATION that white males have argued over and fought for for 500 years are now being taken up by non-whites all over the world. Even within predominantly white cultures generic nation state terms such as 'British' can seem oppressive and for the most part mis-leading. The constant mis-use of the term 'British' to mean 'English' is a case in point. 'British' has traditionaly stood for English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. The ideas and attitudes which he says have shaped our age, Compassion, Irreverence and Creativity, have produced some of the greatest popular art of the post-war world (The Beatles anyone?). What is most prominant in Barzun's tome however is his passionate embrace of liberal economics. Compassion for instance 'requires a constant supply of the poor and the weak, instead of encouraging the healthful and reliant' p.621. These could be the exact sentiments of Charles Trevelyan, head of the relief effort of the largest humanitarian disaster in the 19th century 'Occident', the Irish potato famine, which is mystifyingly overlooked in Barzun's thesis. The fact that in the western part of the richest, most powerful, most industrialized, most democratic and most 'cultured' nation in the world, one million people starved to death, is enough for most to question the benevolance of large nation states and the 'human' benefits of lassiez-faire. The moneterist policies of Thatcher and Reagan also get ignored. Since both these 'radical' leaders came to power in 1979 and 1980 respectively, the welfare state in the Anglo-American world of which Barzun is most familiar, has been stripped of its coffers year after year. With Bush's recent tax cut measures, you can be sure that the most expendable department of federal funding will be the arts. The New Left and the counter-culture of the '60's has been described as 'the last gasp of the western soul', searching for some sense of community. It was the unrestrained free-marketeers who have lowered the cultural levels for all. This is their world. The radical free-marketeers believe nothing should get in the way of making a buck. This ideology culminated in Thatcher's infamous 1987 statement 'There is no such thing as society'. George W. Bush has a much greater understanding of Marx than Jacques Barzun. He understands that history isn't moved by things (as Barzun misunderstands Marx) but by material needs. The time and effort put into securing the oil fields in Iraq (base), while the museums and galleries of Baghdad (superstructure) were largely ignored is testament to his view of history.
Rating: 
Summary: Long and hard, but worth it.
Review: The title of this book gives a guide to the author's underlying theme: "... in the West the culture of the last 500 years is ending." However, this book is not an 800 page list of the ills of society. Rather it is an Eurocentric survey of Western intellectual history. The main strength of the book is that it is lucid history with a point: we're failing.
I spent 2 years reading this book - digesting and digressing into peripheral reading as I went. It is not light reading and someone expecting a brief synopsis should read something else. Barzan clearly has an encyclopedic mind but too often the book seems like an encyclopedia with required blurbs on a dizzying array of personalities. The Eurocentric viewpoint of the book exposed me to many minor, and to me, unknown characters who contributed to Western thought and culture. But, the book slighted America's input into Western thought. For example, Thomas Jefferson receives 10 mentions in the index while Moliere, an infinitely less important determiner of Western thought, gets 14 mentions and 4 pages of text devoted solely to Moliere. I also found the book lacked much on 2 major institutions that have reflected and influenced Western thought: Slavery and The Family. Slavery has always existed but played a major role in development of the West for 400 years. Of course, to the West's credit, the West was the only culture in history to abolish slavery with parts of the United States being the first political entities to specifically outlaw slavery (several New England states). The rise and fall of the family unit parallels the rise and fall of society and leaving out discussion of this important part of society is puzzling in this otherwise excellent work. One especially strong treatment in the book is the "Great Switch" of the early 20th century where liberalism was changed in a few short years from promoting individual freedom to promoting enslavement by the state. I would have liked to see a longer last portion of the book protraying the decadence of modern society. Barzun's depiction of the depravity, violence, and socialism that are killing us is too short and unsupported. In summation, breadth of work, depth of European scholarship, and clarity of thought are excellent. Lack of American influence on Western thought, missing vital institutions like Slavery and Family, and a poor summation of the thesis are faults.
Rating:
Summary: IMPRESSIVE READING
Review: There're some things you must be awared of when start this book: first, obvious but nevertheless important: IT IS LONG! Over 1100 pages where you go from 1500 to 1995, back and forth like a roller coaster... but not at all THAT fast. And there are some sentences, phrases and setences which you have to read time and time again before you THINK you've got'em in context. So it is not only a slow writing but also a slow reading.
Second: this is not an academic work at all. And Barzun himself acknowledge it since the first pages. So, if you want to read a treatise about history, sociology or ny topic as such, just forget it. There is not a precise treatment of sources or the acknowledge of many different positions. Barzun display ONE AND ONLY ONE POSITION in this book: his own. Built upon the impressive general culture of an academic who has devoted his life to study just about everything. In this book you'll find mentions (some of them very deep, some as shallow as just that: a mention) about barroque music, fashion at Versalles Palace, techonology of war in Austria in XVIII century, chaos theory, management practices in the XX century...
But it's curious: Barzun hasn't arranged his work as a portrait but as a vast renaissance fresco. Then and know you run into well known people (Luis XIV, Moliere, Shaw, Shakespeare -LOTS OF HIM -...) but he chose to make his scope wider with "illostrous anonimities". Renaissance are not exemplified with Leonardo or Miguel Angel or Julio II but with the guy who first used the perspective techniques... and from there Barzun draws the picture of a century or a decade or any period he's interested in.
This was for me the value of the book. Some reader critiziced Barzun because of his conclusions "Beethoven is superior to Eminem" or because this isn't Gibbon. Right the last, false the former. Those who said that maybe abandoned the book somewhere in the middle becuase the point is PRECISELY in Barzun that every cultural manifestation is product of a long walk since that moment he calls "the dawn" and "decadence" is not an apocalyptic word but one used to compare the end of the XX century with all that gave roots to his so-called culture.
As for the treatment of some topices: well, maybe chauvinistic americans won't find this book enjoyable. But intelligent ones and those with a peachant to study the world as a unit will. Barzun doesn't said "French revolution is superior to american revolution". He devoted more space to the former than the last, but if you make conclusions counting words devoted to a topic, this is not the book for you. And besides some people would be astonished to learn that some people other than american people thinks French revolution was superior to american revolution indeed.... and I'm not french, so I'm not defending any perspective. In fact, my country and all the southern half or the world has been volatized from the Scope of Mr. Barzun, which he acknowledge also in the prologue of the book.
So you won't find "history" in the sense of individuals in this book. You'll find rather a chronic, which display the culture as the heroine of the tale. The civilization. And yes, for the taste of the people of these days, that kind of history that is not Gibbon of Schneider, full os sources and venerable dust. Thank God there're still people writing like that!
Rating:
Summary: Surpised That I liked The Book
Review: I am not usually one who would read historical tombs like this -- but was stretching out from my normal fiction genre. I do alot of travel to Europe, Mexico, & Central America and picked this up to see if it helped me better understand some of the different perspectives and issues that I experience when I go to places outside the USA. It certainly did that -- and it was a good read too -- not boring or collegial at all. The insights were very meaningful and connected some dots for me. My biggest criticism is that it is so long, and that it overlaps and repeats themes and actions, but from several perspectives.
Rating:
Summary: I didn't finish.
Review: I didn't finish this book, but not for the reasons cited by those who have rated it poorly, and the many who agreed with them. Although, as one reader pointed out, it doesn't really have a theme, the title not withstanding. I suspect that if you are dealing with the history of art, architecture, literature, you either need to focus on selected pieces, with good illustrations, or write more briefly, without as many lengthy biographical discussions as are found in this book. Barzun's brief discussion of Baroque art was terrific, for example.
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