We tend to look at our time as one of unparalled changes that have completely changed how we live. We also think this makes our time unique, but as this book makes clear, ours is not the first time progress and anexity have played such a heady part in the making of the times. This book covers the first 14 years of the 20th century, a time of great progress and inovation, but a time of great anexity as declining birth rates, changing sexual roles, and a world that felt to many as spining too fast created a time of promise and dread. The author seemes fixated on the sexual component, but overall manages to explain the period as it felt to the people who lived it without placing too much empthasis on how the events of the time affected the next 30 years. ( )

Excellent history of the period, very down to earth. ( )

Attempting to write of Europe prior to World War I while adopting the pose that the Twentieth Century was an unwritten book, Blom's overarching response is that this was no "Belle Epoch" but a century that started out compromised. Compromised by its bewilderment that scientific rationality and economic development had produced incomprehensibility and social disorder. Compromised by how sexual relations previously constrained by convention and religion seemed to breaking down. Compromised by political leadership unable to recognize that there was a systemic crisis taking place and that even if there had been a general recognition it's unlikely that empty place holders such as the likes of Wilhelm of Germany, Franz Joseph of Austria or Nicholas of Russia could have been circumvented to provide answers. All of this leading to a flight to unreason as the avenue by which to relate to what could not be assimilated, which found a variety of expressions ranging from modern art to fascist politics to desperate throws of the geopolitical dice.

While I'm not really the person for whom this book was written, Blom writes with aplomb and wit and I greatly enjoyed his style. He also does nothing to assuage my own unease at the current state of things. As another generation of futurists noted (the "cyberpunk" writers such as William Gibson & Bruce Sterling) the future is unevenly distributed and the United States seems to be leaving the last time bubbles of 19th-century thinking with about as much grace as the European powers did. In my darkest moments I hope that we do not commemorate the centennial of 1914 with another Great Power war. ( )

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 ( )

4614. The Vertigo Years Europe, 1900-1914, by Philipp Blom (read 2 Sep 2009) 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 revolution in Russia and of the fight for women's suffrage in Britain were 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!) ( )

The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 is Philipp Blom's third non-fiction book. I bought it on the strength of his former two, both of which are fantastic, and I'm happy I did - his ability to write engagingly on just about any time period is demonstrated here in what is probably his strongest book yet. Bloom's central thesis is that, traditionally told, the years leading up to WWI were overshadowed by the war - it was an idyllic "long summertime" of peace, an extension of the assuredly naive 19th century. However Blom reveals just about everything we think of as "modern" was already happening before the war, it was a time it was a time not of coasting, but of "machines and women, speed and sex," a disintegration of the old world without a clear vision of a new. Like a teenager getting behind the wheel of a car for the first time, it was exciting and dangerous, a cocktail of fundamental social changes converging all at once. Technology of the car, movie, photo and electric light; class relations; women's roles, Freud; Eugenics; colonialism; modern art; cult of "manliness", etc.. all combined to create a fractured new world, where individuals don multiple identities no longer tied to tradition, and an endemic nervous vertiginous exhaustion flourished. Bloom crisscrosses the continent from Russia to England, from the Balkans to Sweden, each page a small feast of ideas, people and events. As a native of Vienna, Bloom commands a deep understanding of central European history in a way I have never seen before, revealing insights and people entirely new to me - it's a true pan-European perspective told with compelling prose.

Like the subject it describes, the book is fractured, moving between ideas, people, events, places and times - but Blom is nothing but orderly in his exposition of how things were related. Freud's theories for instance were mirrored by the political realities of the Austrian culture he lived in. Each chapter has a human interest "frame story" providing a smooth flowing narrative and Ken Burns-like feel for the time. There are ample quotations and fascinating black and white pictures, including a color plate section of modern art. It is a social history not only about the wealthy and intellectual elite, but the attitudes of the general public and zeitgeist of the many. A very long and up to date bibliography and notes section provides a lot more reading.

It's one of the better history books I have read, enhancing my understanding not only of the early 20th century, but its inheritor the present.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )