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    Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century
    Unavailable
    Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century
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    Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century
    Ebook401 pages5 hours

    Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century

    By John Higgs

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The extraordinary story of the twentieth century, as told from the furthest fringes of science, art, and culture.
     
    Before 1900, history was an account of great discoveries that actually made sense. People understand innovations like the steam engine, agriculture, or electricity. The twentieth century, by contrast, gave us quantum entanglement, cubism, relativity, psychedelics, postmodernism, chaos maths, and the Somme.
     
    This is the story of that confusing century as told through the ideas produced at the furthest fringes of our sciences, arts, and culture. Its cast includes well-known geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, and Pablo Picasso, lesser known geniuses like Edward Lorenz, Sergey Korolyov, or Shigeru Miyamoto, and infamous but influential ne’er-do-wells like Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley and Keith Richards. In this company we take a tour through ideas as strange as general relativity, DNA, the subconscious, Gaia theory, and Dada.
     
    In this brilliantly written and original book, John Higgs explores, with great clarity and wit, the extremes of twentieth century thought, and in doing so shows how a world of empires became a world of individuals. You will never see the twentieth century in the same way again.
     
    “An illuminating work of massive insight.” —Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta
     
    “A beautiful, erudite, funny and enlightening tour of the widening boundaries of uncertainty revealed in the twentieth century.” —Robin Ince
     
    “Hugely entertaining and thought-provoking.” —Scott Pack
     
    “To paraphrase Colonel Kurtz, reading John Higgs is like being shot with a diamond. Suddenly everything becomes terrifyingly clear.” —Mojo
     
    “In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs broadens his intellectual reach to encompass modernism, situationism, chaos theory, indeterminacy and almost every other byway of that epoch. . . . A fine example of learning worn lightly.” —New Scientist
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 1, 2015
    ISBN9781619026803
    Unavailable
    Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century

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    Reviews for Stranger Than We Can Imagine

    4.5/5

    6 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This books is fun, broad and provides an important insightful theme to what the 20th century has enacted on all our pillars of certainty. This is a MUST READ for anyone interested in the current Zeitgeist of uncertainty.
    • 5/5
      Great writer who I have only just discovered. I have already got some of his other books.
    • 4/5

      This is an interesting book, but it is in no way a history of the Twentieth Century: it picks up a number of important themes and looks at them from a number of non-standard angles but it is a connected set of essays and lacks a great deal which would be required to make it "a history of the twentieth century"

      Just how non-standard may be judged by the fact that it cites Greg Hill (i.e. Malaclypse the Younger) on Emperor Norton and later on in the book drags in the I Ching's Breaking Apart pattern (23); although it contains no reference to giant yellow submarines or golden apples, it does include Illuminatus! in its bibliography.

      I would hand this to somebody who was starting out in modern history as a useful primer in themes to be on the lookout for in detailed study, but it told me little I didn't already know (aside from some interesting bits about the genesis of Super Mario).

    • 5/5
      The twentieth century can be understood as the loss of all omphaloi.What are omphaloi, you might ask? An omphalos is the central hub of something. For ancient Israel, for example, the Holy of Holies in the Temple on Mount Zion was the omphalos of the world. It was the place where heaven connected with earth. The twentieth century is littered with fallen omphaloi.- Einstein's relativity theories destroyed the omphalos of a fixed place.- War destroyed the omphalos of national emperors.- Freud's psychology destroyed the omphalos of the rational mind.- The sexual revolution destroyed the omphalos of traditional morality.John Higgs is equally adept at explaining quantum mechanics as he is with evaluating the impact of Super Mario Bros. on Postmodernism—and he does all of this with a great sense of humour. Here's how he explains the counter-intuitive laws of the quantum world:"The quantum world is like the fun your teenage children and their friends have in their room. You know it exists because you can hear the shrieks and laughter throughout the house, but if you pop your head around the door, it immediately evaporates and leaves only a bunch of silent self-conscious adolescents. A parent cannot see this fun in much the same way that the sun cannot observe a shadow. And yet, it exists" (119).Stranger Than We Can Imagine is a brilliant analysis of the twentieth century. For me, Higgs only runs into trouble when he gets to the present. With all the traditional omphaloi fallen, we are at the risk of tragic individualism. Higgs views the emerging social networks as a solution that provides social responsibility while not limiting personal freedom. Selfies are not symptoms of narcissism—they are ways to strengthen the nodes of the emerging network.I don't think we can live without omphaloi. As a Christian, I hold the Creator of heaven and earth as my centre. Higgs would likely view this as an antiquated hold-over from the twentieth-century, something that will be outmoded by personal freedom expressed in networked society. I see the network, with all of its mixed impact social impact, as yet another type of omphalos in a long line. We will always worship something.
    • 4/5
      One of the more original history books you can read. Not the classic tale on the 20th century going from WWI to WWII and all the way to the crisis of the 80's but from Einstein over cubism, individuality, nihilims, popart, Super Mario and the network we are all part of today, like here on Librarything.Higgs is an artist, one that has done a lot of research, but still an artist in my opinion. The way he composes the book, the links between chapters that look unlinked at the start, the very educational (without becoming preachy) style in situating the origin of a phenomenon, explaining it and then giving the effects of the phenomenon provide real insight. Sometimes easy to recognise, sometimes you need a second look, but always clear, always part of the composition that this book is. It is not 15 stand alone chapters on 15 different things, by coincidence all happening in the 20th century. It is a piece of art, a cubistic one, that gives you the time to reflect on yourself, on the world, on society's past and future.And it has a positive end. Brace yourself. Thank you for this wonderful book, Mr. Higgs.