Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World
TLDR: “Well-researched, kinda interesting, but pretty tedious”
This book has one purpose: to persuade you that Vienna is responsible for a shocking amount of the world’s progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors make a case that a lot of the most influential figures came from Vienna.
There are too many names in the book to keep track of, so I asked AI to make me a list of what it considered the top 10:
- Sigmund Freud
- Gustav Klimt
- Adolf Hitler
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Karl Popper
- Oskar Kokoschka
- Stefan Zweig
- Egon Schiele
- Otto Wagner
That’s fair, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface (where is Hedy Lamarr?).
As I noted in the verdict, the book gets tedious. It’s just a long recitation of history, and it kind of all blurs together after a while. The book covers such a breadth of disciplines, that there’s no way anyone would have enough perspective on everything to understand it all.
(Also, weirdly, the book had really long chapters. Like, 50+ pages each.)
I don’t regret reading it, but I feel like it could have been shorter.
Book Info
- Author
- Richard Cockett
- Year
- Pages
- 464
- Acquired
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- I own an electronic copy of this book.