Book Alert / The Vertigo Years

The Vertigo Years -- Europe, 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom, Basic Books '08, $29.95, 466 pages, ISBN #0465011160. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of color glossy images, b&w images sprinkled throughout text.

One difficulty in compartmentalizing a period in history and then explaining it organically is that history doesn't move in chapters. So when historian Philipp Blom characterizes the period from 1900-1914 as "dizzying years of tremendous change," it would be incorrect to consider them an isolated period, since they were informed by the decades that preceded them and went on to inform the years of World War I and the those that came afterward.

That said, Blom has produced an engaging and wide-ranging survey of the years leading up to Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, exploring such varied topics as feminism, quantum theory, atonal music, mass communication, psychoanalysis, and consumerism. Influential events covered include Paris's world's fair, the death of Britain's Queen Victoria, the "Bloody Sunday" mayhem in St. Petersburg, Louis Bleriot of France's monoplane flight across the English Channel, and the first international conference of eugenics in London.

It is Blom's thesis that "The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele -- but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I....Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society -- as well as the very fabric of sexual relations."

Author Philipp Blom, born in Hamburg and educated as a historian in Vienna and Oxford, has written two other books. He lives in Vienna.