Century's End - Softcover

Schwartz, Hillel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385479816 ISBN 13: 9780385479813

Publisher: Doubleday Business, 1995

Synopsis

A "Future Shock" for the turn of the century, Century's End contains a rich trove of facts that will delight readers whose job it is to know what moods will befall us, what fears we need to assuage, and what ideas will claim our attention and our dollars as we near the beginning of the new millennium.

About this title

From the Publisher

It's the end of a century. It's the end of slide rules and tickertape, manualtypewriters and dial telephones, carbon paper in layers and television inblack-and-white. It's the end of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, the ColdWar, the Soviet Union, South African apartheid, the world in black-and-white.It may even be, as some say, the end of history, the end of nature, the end ofmeaning, the end of time.

Century's End: An Orientation Manual Toward the Year 2000. Copyright© 1995 by Hillel Schwartz.

From Library Journal

The reviewer began this book with high hopes, which soon deflated. The book's idea is promising: to examine our preoccupation with closing dates--the ends of centuries and millenia--as we prepare for apocalypse or salvation at the end of another century and millenium. The book raises intriguing questions: When did we settle on the end of the century as the date around which to crystallize fears and hopes? When and why did the double zero of end of century triumph over other, equally potent numerical schemes and other calendars? But Schwartz's conception of fin de siecle is little more than a hook upon which he hangs anecdote after anecdote. The book is not helped by Schwartz's employment of painfully jaunty jargon ("janiform schema of fin de siecle").
- David Keymer, SUNY Inst. of Technology, Utica
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday Business
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0385479816
• ISBN 13: 9780385479813
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English