A Terrible Beauty

This work presents a narrative of the 20th century, concentrating on the ideas that made the century so rich, rewarding and provocative. It covers topics from the creation of plastic to Norman Mailer, from the discovery of the Big Bang to the Counterculture, from Relativity to Susan Sontag, from Proust to Salman Rushdie, and Henri Bergson to Saul Bellow. The text aims to affirm that there was much more to the 20th century than war and genocide.