SOURCE: “Look Back in Wonder,” in Washington Post Book World, July 2, 2000, p. 8.

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

At 92, Jacques Barzun has earned the right to be eccentric. He serves up a book [From Dawn to Decadence] 800 pages long but proudly saves space by writing “16C” instead of “sixteenth century.” He has spent most of his working life in New York, that center of hard-selling self-promotion; but he begins his opus by stating grimly, “I do not expect the reader to be steadily grateful.” His focus on Western civilization is almost gratuitously dismissive of other cultures; at one point he labels Buddhism and Islam “cults,” to be bracketed along with yoga and transcendental meditation. As he says himself, “I have not consulted current prejudices. My own are enough to keep me busy.”

And yet grateful is precisely how this reader...