Rating: 
Summary: A Sweeping Interpretation of Western Culture
Review: Jacques Barzun's book "From Dawn to Decadence" is not a book for the casual reader who knows little of his past; there is simply too much to overwhelm the uninformed. The well read, on the other hand, may find it somewhat unsatisfying, at times, as Barzun covers so much ground that one continuously begs for more detail which rarely is forthcoming. That said, even the most knowledgable will find subjects of interest in this book, and Barzun's interpretation of the development and decline of Western culture is certainly worth understanding.Barzun takes what he believes are the essential features of Western life, i.e., emancupation, individualism, secularism, self-consciousness, analysis, the free market in ideas, the notion of progress, specialization and abstraction and shows how their development led to revolutionary charges and brilliance. Those who criticize Barzun for a "conservative" outlook would do well to remember that the author understands how positive the "revolutionary" changes in the West have been in many respects. These features of Western culture have led to achievements of the highest order. But, Barzun also comprehends the tendency for people to descend into "primitivism" and, when this is coupled with the extremes of secularization, self-consciousness, analysis, individualism, and specialization, the culture becomes decadent with its loss of vision and vitality. This has been clearly evident for half a century. All values and ideals, when carried to their logical extreme, negate themselves. Let us remember that the past fifty years or so has given us Andy Warhol, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others of that ilk. The signs of decadence are all around if you care to look. Barzun has examines the trends of Western cultural life for over 500 years and his analysis is to be respected and listened to. And, yes, we should be concerned.
Rating: 
Summary: This Book Was a Struggle!!
Review: I have owned this book for over a year and have struggled to get through it, despite my best efforts. Even on the sea days of a long cruise last summer, I was unable to get interested in this plodding, tedious, and at times pompously-written tome. While I have the greatest respect for the author's encyclopedic knowledge, I found the narrative dull and uncaptivating. As bedside reading, this book worked wondered for its soporific effects -- far better than any prescription medication.
Rating:
Summary: Right Assessment, Questionable Prognosis
Review: I first came to know Jacques Barzun as an undergrad, having been issued Barzun & Graff's "The Modern Researcher" for my historiography class. In research, the emphasis is on rigor. The great nineteenth-century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel also emphasized rigor. Lose your rigor and you lose your integrity. This is how Hegel accounts for the fate of nations and I think Barzun shares this belief, as he chronicles western civilization, from its infancy - its dawn - to today's world, witnessing the devolution not only of nations (UK, the Balkans, Russia) but of western civilization itself (multi-culturalism, moral relativism, breakdown of the nuclear family). Barzun's masterful narrative skills and prodigous knowledge make "Dawn to Decadence" wonderful reading. For this alone I give it 4 stars. And I certainly agree with him that today's academy is in a sorry state, in thrall as it is with structuralist and linguistic cusuistry, serving no purpose outside pedagogical exercises yet infecting the minds of undergraduates, our future social leaders, with a nihilistic and enervated outlook, resulting in a fatuous, aimless, hedonistic - decadent - body cultural and politic, ill-equipped and unwilling to provide the life support necessary for a civilization with a vital future. I contrast Barzun with Kenneth Clark, another student of Western Civilization, who reaches much the same conclusions. But while Barzun sees the over-refined and fatuous, Clark sees the youthful and dynamic. Thus, I doubt if the late Lord Clark would agree with Barzun's rather gloomy outlook. Jacques Barzun is a product of the nineteenth century, which ended in 1945. What some would call the malaise of the fifty-odd years that followed, the truncated twentieth century, was actually a hangover from the nineteenth. Barzun is like many old men who believe that the world of "today" is going to hell in a teapot. I think that while Barzun diagnoses the state of contemporary Western Civilization correctly, his prognosis is less sound, because he doesn't understand "today" now as well as he understood "today" in his youth or in his prime. Frankly, I think our world has emerged from the mess which Barzun's world created in a much better state than anyone, knowing the sorry history of the world until then, had any right to expect. Kierkegaard said life can only be understood backward - you can explain only the past - but can only be lived forward. I only wish Barzun - and I, for that matter - could be around fifty years from now to see that his despair of Western Civilization was unwarranted.
Rating: 
Summary: The Intellectual Tourist
Review: This challenging work argues that the last 500 years form a distinct period during which the Occident has made tremendous advances in culture and science, only to have run out of steam in the present day and fallen into a state of decadence. Barzun compares the modern era to the glorious past, and like so many before him, he finds it wanting. The author invites you to become an intellectual tourist as he surveys the highlights of the last five centuries. The terrain is familiar, but the perspective is individual, the interpretations often quirky and you are always challenged to re-examine your assumptions. Two unusual features of Barzun's book are the quotations in bold type that are scattered around the text to illustrate his points and his recommendations of books to read on topics of special interest. The latter serves as a sort of eccentric bibliography in miniature, and has furnished this reviewer with many happy ideas for future reading. The most provocative remarks are reserved for the last part of the book, which provides a long list of what the author feels is wrong with western society at the end of the millenium. Some of these are the usual complaints of the fastidious conservative, while others are harder to dismiss. Readers will have to decide for themselves where they stand on these issues, and whether they agree with Mr. Barzun that "Western Civ." is going down the tubes. But it's a fascinating journey, and Jacques Barzun is a wonderful guide.
Rating:
Summary: A Frank Look at this Book
Review: I began reading this book on June 3 and read at it steadily till I finished it yesterday, June 10. (I don't think one should inflict one's review of a book on others unless one does actaully read the entire book.) I found this book tedious at times, especially, naturally, when he was talking about things I know little about and really don't care very much about--the more obscure things about painting, for instance. Some reviewers have mentioned Paul Johnson and Norman Davies. I read (on March 8, 1992) Johnson's Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties and found it much easier and more fun to read than this book. I also (on Jan 7, 1998) read Norman Davies' Europe: A History, and found it more interesting and a lot easier reading than this book (and not simply because it is not a cultural history as this book of Barzun's is). There are a lot of good things in this book, but the poor footnoting is an example of poor editing. At times I could find no footnote for the page even tho a footnote was indicated. And I would have liked a real bibliography, or at least a list of every book the author tells us we should read (I know, I should have made a list of his recommendations as I was reading--but how convenient it would be to have all the recommendations listed on a couple of pages, instead of having to go thru the book hunting them!). I am somewhat hesitant to read what he recommends since I did not find the book he wrote compelling reading. But there is much worth reading and savoring in this book, and the last chapter says many true things about today's world.
Rating:
Summary: Unfocused; poor writing
Review: Put quite simply, Barzun seems more interested in filling his pages with minutiae and irrelevant details regarding his subjects than focusing on a solid narrative that culminates in a specific argument. I really think all this book is is a huge kitchen sink of disjointed (sometimes interesting, most of the time not) reflections by a historian who is out of step with current scholarship and issues. This is the kind of book that gives history a bad name, in my opinion. It is shallow, pompous, and will not sink down to the reader's level to allow him or her to enjoy the glories of its subject. Well that's not high brow it's just poor writing. In comparison, I recently read Alistaire Horne's book on the siege and commune in Paris and I simply could not believe how extraordinary the prose was in that book. Albeit horses of a different color...the bottom line is that I think that you should read a history book in which the writing is captivating and intimately relates you with its subject. Given this criteria, "From Yawn To Decadence" is a failure.
Rating:
Summary: Inspirational
Review: Jacques Barzun is an intellectual's intellectual. From Dawn to Decadence is not only one of the most intellectually stimulating books I've read in a while but it is inspirational for anyone who wishes to transcend Western culture's intellectual shoddiness. Not only does one come away from the work with a sense of what a full life of the mind used to look like but, in Mr. Barzun's erudition, one sees a living model of the depth and richness of the well-trained intellect. I would recommend this book for anyone who wishes to expand their grounding in Western civilization.
Rating:
Summary: a very dull encyclopedia
Review: I didn't think this book deserved one star, but it's the lowest mark I'm allowed to give. I am truly puzzled by all the high praise this book is getting on the online reviews (which was the reason I bought the book). If you are not familiar with European cultural/intellectual history, then this book is not going to be that interesting. You would be much better served reading one of the standard European history textbooks. D to D goes into too much esoteric (and I believe superfluous in many cases) details to be of much interest to the novice. If you are well-versed in European history, then this book is simply an encyclopedia - a review of what you already learned. Of course, Barzun adds details that I didn't know before, but most of it is simply dull and irrelevant. I felt that a lot of times, he was providing information to just show off his encyclopedic knowledge, which is substantial. However, he doesn't really provide any interesting insights or new ways to view history. Without such really interesting ideas, Barzun has tried to compensate with a lot of dull tidbits.
Rating:
Summary: More of a sustained thesis than history
Review: This is an entertaining book, but I wouldn't classify it as history. It's more of a sustained argument defended by countless exempla. The author makes several good points, but I think it would have been more interesting if cut in half wihtout all of the fluff. There are a number of things that I found incredibly irritating. 1.) No *historical* synthesis: The narrative rambles between historical anecdotes and "ominous" modern parallels. There is a chronological sequence, but it is vague and fuzzy. The historical narrative is choppy and frequently pedestrian. This is not Macauley or Gibbon. 2.) The author has a number of sidebars, "Cross Sections", in which he supposedly analyzes a *city* during a certain point in time. However, he doesn't do this at all. He begins with a basic overview of the city, but then jumps all over the place. For example, his section on Weimar begins in Germany, then, within the space of four pages, drifts to the American colonies, with an account of Baumarchais. 3.) The personalities that are highlighted are often obscure, and aren't as representative of the period as the author would wish us to believe. 4.) The prose is frequently irritating. Barzun hammers into the reader all of the kitschy political terms that are central to his thesis, writing them all in caps: EMANCIPATION, INDIVIDUALISM, SELF-AWARENESS... So why four stars and not two, or three? -- The answer is that I did enjoy it, but I just didn't find it *historically* incisive. It's Western Civilization painted in broad strokes.
Rating:
Summary: An Extremely Worthwhile Read
Review: FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE is a book that dares to tackle one of the "biggest" subjects imaginable: The cultural history of the West over the past 500 years. Beginning with the Protestant Reformation and working his way forward, Barzun touches on nearly aspect of society as he goes along. Barzun's thesis is that western culture has moved through various phases of ascendency, along the way allowing certain trends (such as "emancipation" to develop), and that those trends (along with the culture itself) are now pretty much played out. (This is described as a natural course of a society's evolution). He makes a compelling argument that western culture has been in a state of decline since the outbreak of World War I, and sits today in a state of limbo, waiting for the next cultural phenomenon to take place. To support this position, Barzun takes us on an amazing tour of the last 500 years, with innumerable stopping points along the way. In the process we meet several mostly forgotten individuals who helped to shape our society, and we are present as several modern "politically-correct" assumptions are debunked. The author joyfully celebrates the importance of western culture in the world's development, never succumbing to brainless modern platitudes of "oppression" such as blaming Columbus for everything that followed (at the same time, though, he's willing to lay blame where it is legitimately due). We're also treated to an incredible bibliography, allowing us to branch out into any of the areas Barzun introduces. Interestingly, this is not really a history book. The author assumes a general knowledge of events like the French Revolution, World War One and other epoch-making events. Rather, this is exactly like the subtitle says: A review of the elements that go to making up culture...in other words, how the events of history shaped people's lives and society's essence, rather than the events themselves. This is not light reading (although highly readable); to really penetrate it requires slower, deliberative study and thought. I also wouldn't characterize Barzun as an "excellent writer"; his excellence is in content, not style. But the content is so consistently, magnificently interesting that one gets the feeling this book wil be consulted for a long time to come. Recommended.
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