SOURCE: “A Rich and Tangled Web,” in World and I, Vol. 15, No. 11, November, 2000, p. 235.

In the following review, Gress offers a positive evaluation of From Dawn to Decadence.

Seven decades of life, reading, learning, and experience has gone into From Dawn to Decadence, an impressively energetic, exhilarating, and spirited work of a wise man and great scholar, Jacques Barzun. Seven adult decades, that is; Barzun is in his nineties and presents this latest and largest of his works as the fruit of a lifetime. And it is no monument to crusty pedantry or grab bag of unconnected anecdotes. It is a vigorous chronicle full of strong and convincing themes, an account of how the West was made and how it is now unmaking itself.

The modern West was shaped, Barzun argues, by four revolutions and the ideas, themes, and aspirations that inspired them. They are the religious, monarchical...