SOURCE: “Venturing Provocative Judgments,” in New Leader, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 2, May-June, 2000, pp. 42-3.

In the following review, Meyer offers a positive assessment of From Dawn to Decadence.

My spontaneous response upon learning of Jacques Barzun's hefty new work was delight and surprise that he is still with us and still scribbling. Born in France in 1907, formerly a professor of history and provost at Columbia University, author of Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950) and other important books, Barzun is seemingly the sole survivor of that once celebrated constellation on Morningside Heights: Lionel Trilling and Meyer Schapiro, Richard Hofstadter and Margaret Mead, C. Wright Mills and Ivan Morris, among others. At 92, on the evidence of this bravura performance, Barzun remembers more than most of us have learned.

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life might at quick glance appear to be that soporific thing, a professorial “survey,” an...