Wide-ranging and quirky, this history of our times (since World War I) hits all the highlights and hot spots: the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, World War II,and the 198os A latter-day Mencken,Johnson is witty, gritty, and compulsively readable.

  --Foreign Affairs

A work of intellect and imagination.

  --Stephen Spender,The Atlantic

Truly a distinguished work of history We can take a great deal of intellectual pleasure in this book.

 --Robert A. Nisbet,New York Times Book Review

Frequently surprises, even startles us with new views of past events and fresh looks at the characters of the chief world movers and shakers in politics, the military, economies, science, religion, and philosophy.

  --Edmund Fuller,Wall Street Journal

Acknowledgments

1 A Relativist World

2 The First Despotic Utopias

3 Waiting for Hitler

4 Legitimacy in Decadence

5 An Infernal Theocracy, a Celestial Chaos

6 The Last Arcadia

7 Degringolade

8 The Devils

9 The High Noon Of Aggression

10 The End of Old Europe

11 The Watershed Year

12 Superpower and Genocide

13 Peace by Terror

14 The Bandung Generation

15 Caliban's Kingdoms

16 Experimenting.with Half Mankind

17 The European Lazarus

18 America's Suicide Attempt

19 The Collectivist Seventies

20 The Recovery of Freedom

Source Notes

Index