From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

"A stunning five-century study of civilization's cultural retreat." — William Safire, New York Times

Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.

Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaissance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our p...