Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

The extraordinary story of the 20th century, as told from the furthest fringes of science, art and culture. For readers of Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.

     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.


From the Hardcover edition.

JOHN HIGGS is the author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary and The Brandy of the Damned. He created the long-running BBC Radio quiz show X Marks the Spot and has directed more than 100 episodes of animated pre-school British TV. He was raised in North Wales and now lives in Brighton with his partner and their two children. He blogs at www.johnhiggs.com.

From the Hardcover edition.