The first moderns : profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought /

Everdell (St. Ann's School, Brooklyn, NY) looks to a number of fields and persons in the few decades before and after the turn of the 20th century to discover the birth of modernism in the growing awareness that the world is discontinuous and discrete instead of continuous and whole. With an animated, erudite narrative he elucidates crucial shifts in mathematics, physics, painting, literature, logical philosophy, psychology, and the culture of cities away from continuity and tradition toward a pervasive atomism--discrete numbers, disconnected neurons, specks of color, peoples isolated in concentration camps, still frames in moving pictures, multiple perspectives in cubist art, or tones without melodic lines to hold them. He masterfully interweaves accounts of the personal lives of figures as diverse as Cantor, Bolzman, Seurat, Rimbaud, Cajal (discoverer of the neuron), Weyler (inventor of the concentration camp), Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Freud, Schoenberg, Joyce, and Kandinsky with their discoveries that helped launch modernity. He gives us intimate sketches of city life in Vienna, Paris, St. Louis, and St. Petersburg, revealing how modernity was both resisted and produced in these cities. In short, this is a wonderfully crafted work delineating the rise of modernity through the analysis of its key founding figures. Highly recommended for all libraries and for any individual who delights in intellectual history. General; undergraduate; graduate; faculty. J. H. Riker; Colorado College

By 1912, nothing but fragments remained of the once-smooth masonry of culture, destroyed by radicals who dared to ask explosive new questions and to adopt destabilizing new perspectives. In a work of remarkable breadth, Everdell recounts the feats of these provocateurs--including Rimbaud and Freud, Joyce and Stein, Planck and Einstein, Schoenberg and Kandinsky--who destroyed the old cultural edifice and erected the structure called modernism in its place. While making full allowance for differences in aims and methods, Everdell nonetheless shows that all of the founders of modernism were groping toward a new conception of the universe as an aggregate of disparate and isolated elements. Whether in Kandinsky's untamed artistry, Joyce's experimental fiction, or Planck's quantum physics, the open vistas of tradition vanished, replaced by acute but disconnected glimpses of a startling world. By discerning the deep-down kinship of set theorists in mathematics, of symbolists in poetry, and of pointillists in painting, Everdell has performed a rare service for his readers. Dispelling much of the current nonsense about "postmodernism," this book belongs on the very short list of profound works of cultural analysis. --Bryce Christensen

In his introduction, Everdell makes the point that educated readers use the word modernism all the time, "possessed of certain spreadeagled definitions learned, perhaps, in courses in art history or 20th century fiction and reinforced by daily trips through the glass canyons of downtown." While Everdell dislikes loose, rangy definitions of modernism extrapolated from art alone, he relishes the fact that understanding modernism demands "a bit of everything" and a willingness to indulge in "wholesale crossing of what we have come, in the 20th century, to call `disciplinary barriers.' " Everdell himself crosses and recrosses those barriers, venturing from philosophy, mathematics and literature to science, art and politics. Rather than adopting an academic, theory-based approach, Everdell relies on narrative to illustrate the shift between 19th-century certainty and the atomized, self-referential, uncertain universe of the 20th century. Each self-contained chapter stands alone as an intellectual exploration of a particular idea, discovery, personality or event. Those chapters create some illuminating juxtapositions, as when the section on Ludwig Boltzmann and his research into molecular theory abuts one on Georges Seurat and pointillism. Everdell does not just discuss their achievements in their cultural contexts, however‘he narrates their discoveries. His approach has a certain humanizing immediacy, but the overall effect is discontinuous‘perhaps a reflection of modernism itself, but still frustrating in a book that purports to trace the history of an intellectual and artistic epoch. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this truly exciting study of the origins of modernist thought, poet and teacher Everdell (The End of Kings, 1983) roams freely across disciplinary lines, commenting on fields as disparate as mathematics and moving pictures, neuroscience and music, and literature and the concentration camps. He argues that the most original thinkers in the modern age (ca. 1870 to 1914) illuminated a shared perception of the world, pointing to a reality seen as fragmented and discontinuous, isolate, "digital" (yes/no, not flowing), and quantized. "Modernists dissect routinely and obsessively.... The intellectual world of Modernism is...a world of precise definition and separability." Some of the thinkers Everdell profiles include mathematician Georg Cantor, physicists Ludwig Bolzmann and Albert Einstein, Freud, Seurat and Picasso, Rimbaud and Whitman, Edwin S. Porter, and Merce Cunningham. A brilliant book that will prove useful to scholars and generalists for years to come; enthusiastically recommended.‘David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Everdell (The End of Kings, 1983) presents one of the more accessible studies of early Modernism (up to WW I), relying on a ""big name"" approach to dissect the meanings of one of the most slippery terms in all of cultural criticism. Using geographical benchmarks to elaborate on the subject of Modernism, Everdell first presents imperial Vienna, then Paris, and finally St. Louis as examples of Modernist trends precipitating, emerging, and evolving. Dismissing Virginia Woolf's assertion that the Modern era began ""on or about December 1910,"" Everdell nimbly places such supposedly pre-Modern thinkers and artists as Mach (whose name is still used to denote the speed of sound), Seurat, and Whitman in the long evolutionary trend of Modernism, demonstrating their influence on developments like relativity theory (Einstein), the invention of film (Thomas Edison), and High Modernism (Pound, Eliot, Williams). This inclusive view expands the commonly accepted Modernist canon; it also stresses the crucial nature of influence, showing, for instance, Picasso's cubism and Kandinsky's abstract expressionism prefiguring their interwar works, and the atonal music of Arthur Schoenberg exerting influence on Philip Glass. Everdell presents an intriguing chapter on Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, governor of Cuba, and his grisly contribution to Modern culture in 1896: the concentration camp. Hitler and Stalin get only passing references, but it is the exclusion here of Michel Foucault in the discussion of penal institutions that seems glaring. Similarly, the absence of Ferdinand de Saussure in a chapter on phenomenology, which includes Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl, omits a giant in the field of sign study. Still, these are minor lapses in what is otherwise a sturdy and erudite overview of one of the most complex periods of thought. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.