saintdoormatius 's review for:

Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938 by Philipp Blom

4.0

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A great book that seems, like it's titled, rather fractured at first, but ultimately builds to a solid conclusion (strangely, but convincingly, linking the interwar years with the current state of the world). Each chapter becomes a distinct yet thematically-aligned mini-history, and covers everything from the emergence of Surrealism (yay!), to the European film industry and expectations of the future as evident in Metropolis, to the parallels between Okie migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl with European jews fleeing Germany and the emergence of Palestine. If you don't mind your history broadly organized and breezily written (my one complaint about this book, really), this book is a good one, especially following Blom's own "Vertigo Years."