In the Beginning: The Advent of the Modern Age, Europe in the 1840's

Focusing on Europe in the 1840s as the crucible of the modern world, Blum's lively, opinionated, engrossing chronicle is a tour de force of popular exposition. He brings to life a decade that ushered in the modern welfare state, the population explosion, photography, the telegraph and militant workers' movements culminating in revolutions that swept from Paris to Austria, Prussia and Italy in 1848. In Britain, the upper classes developed a social conscience, a new awareness of the plight of the poor. Under Czar Nicholas I's repressive autocracy, a ``golden age of Russian culture'' paradoxically flourished, nurturing Dostoyevski, Turgenev, Gogol. In the aftermath of revolution, the French middle classes helped crush workers' and peasants' dreams, creating an abyss between the classes that still characterizes modern France. Former chair of Princeton's history department, Blum peoples his canvas with fiery Irish agitator Daniel O'Connell, Polish romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, physicist Michael Faraday, epileptic Austrian Emperor Ferdinand and many more. (Feb.)