Modern Time, a work of astounding breadth and clarity, identifies three seminal intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century-Marx, Freud, and Einstein-whose ideas directly and indirectly lead to communism, totalitarianism, and Nazism, three forms of government that rejected personal responsibility and the Judeo-Christian morality of the West. Marx said, according to Johnson, that society shaped people. Freud said our childhood shaped us. Finally, numerous intellectuals used Einstein's theory of relativity, much to Einstein's chagrin, to diminish the achievements of Western Civilization before the twentieth century and to advocate moral relativism as a new pseudo religion. Johnson then shows how this line of thinking lead to the death, enslavement, and impoverishment of billions of people across the world.

The book covers not just the superpowers but the explosion of the third world, with its copycat Hitlers, Stalins, and Maos. Most enlightening of all, the phalanx of intellectuals the wealth of the West made possible actually aided and abetted the corruption of the Soviet Union, Red China, fascist Germany, and all their dreadful imitators (for additional insight on terrible consequence of intellectuals, see Johnson's book, The Intellectuals). Worse, this scourge of our times has attacked every institution that lead the West to rule the world, from Christianity, to free enterprise, to democracy.

While Johnson finished the book more than a decade ago, his insights clarify the world today, from the chaos of the Middle East to never-ending butchery in Africa and juntas of the Western Hemisphere. Unlike far too many modern historians (who all too often merely illustrate Johnson's theme), Johnson makes bold and accurate declarations time and again and provides an avalanche of facts to make his case.

If this were the work of an entire lifetime - the culmination of decades of research - I could understand how one man could do it. But this is just one of his many books. I cannot imagine how he did anything but keep his nose in research books for all this time. Simply amazing. We all knew the general outline of the deeds of such figures (don't want to call them men) as Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the scores of other figures with lesser range did, but to read the details that Johnson provides is as if to have it told us for the first time. Simply amazing.

Some reviewers here and there condemn this writer with their own little version of hatred for the dissemination of these facts and patterns, but I cannot imagine that they actually read the book: are they claiming that these events did not occur? Are they insinuating that Mr. Johnson made them up? One reviewer said he did not mention women or the women's movement and I can only conclude that she did not read the last (long) chapter.

Mr. Johnson does not recount the deeds of big government and simply sit in judgement with a "bad bad bad"; he just recounts the deeds in terms of deaths, imprisonment, and torture. He then "lifts" the historic figures "up" to reveal the similarities among them and also describes the unique shadow each casts upon the term DICTATOR. He leaves the reader to come to his or her own moral conclusions. If you like dictators, you will not like this book.

His critics will be those who still are in favor of big government solutions. They will not have been able to get through the book - they will throw it against the wall. They will continue to "do" history and "do" politics this way: "Wouldn't it be nice if ...." and "Hey, what if we tried to be nice?" Big government is a wish, a hope.

Freedom takes courage, and courage has its source in the individual heart.

It is wonderful to learn that Mr. Johnson is still alive and smiling (WSJ interview from 2011).

Every now and then you read a book that changes you. Johnson's ability to frame events, present facts, and tell the story are first rate. Many of the events are well known to me, but lacked the greater, high-level context Johnson puts forth. I was hooked from the very start.

You would think this book would start with WWI. No, he starts with Albert Einstein. He refers to relativity throughout the book. Johnson casts a wide web that shows time and again every utopian experiment in the 20th century ended tragically. The connecting web for all of them is collectivism and concentrated power in the hands of the economic, political, cultural, and military managers, often consolidated into a central manager.

I highly recommend this book. It should shake your world view.

While working at a public high school in New Jersey I observed a rather interesting pedagogical practice. It looked a little something like this: a band of students acting as undercover ambassadors of their history class would approach an unsuspecting non-history teacher with a historical or geographical trivia question. If the stunned teacher could not, say, identify a particular world destination on a blank map, or name a particular African dictator responsible for such and such event, the students would then report this failure back to their history class, sneering all the way at the ignorance of that unfortunate teacher, who was then labeled by the history class as being representative of a larger pattern of ignorance within our culture.

I'm not here to debate the merits of this type of assignment (although, someone should point out to the annoyingly arrogant students that the only reason why they know the answer is because their history teacher just talked about it last period...). I simply wish to share that the knowledge that, at any time, these students could be on the prowl struck a chord of fear in my heart. Commanding proper attention and authority as a young, female teacher is hard enough as it is; the last thing I need is to not be able to point out the Republic of Djibouti on a blank map in front of my entire class.

I've always been a bit insecure about my flimsy knowledge of historical and world happenings. The last time I took a proper world history class, I was a sophomore in high school. And, it was taught by the high school football coach, whose favorite technique was to distribute pastel colored worksheets, which we were then told to complete on our own. Needless to say, not a whole lot stuck. I can't blame all my ignorance on Coach Small, though. If I had spent my college summer vacations reading about history instead of playing countless hours of Tropico, I would be a much better person today.

Reading Modern Times by Paul Johnson constituted an attempt to better my historically-challenged self. This is not a people's history, nor does it focus in depth on any one particular person or event. Rather, it's the story of the 20th's century's world leaders, the various ideologies they represented and the bloodshed that resulted when utopian visions inevitably imploded. Johnson seems to be particularly fascinated by the 20th century's unique propensity for producing charismatic revolutionaries, visionaries and messiahs whose often whimsical and ill-conceived decisions tragically influenced the lives of millions of people. The law of unintended consequences is a key theme in this book.

One characteristic of Modern Times that I appreciated is that Johnson doesn't claim he's done the impossible task of presenting the cold facts of history in an objective manner, completely free from bias. Rather, he unabashedly analyzes history, massaging the landscape of the 20th century into a narrative arc, replete with characters, themes and tragedies. His basic premise, which drives his analysis, is that Nietzsche's prediction for the 20th came true, that at the dawn of modern times "the belief in the Christian God would no longer be tenable." The vacuum left behind by God's absence inevitably needed to be filled. Johnson goes on to argue, "Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which offered a more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster statesmen to emerge. They were not slow to make their appearance" (48).

The fact that a traditional Judeo-Christian worldview undergirds Johnson's argument might not sit well with some readers who disagree with his presuppositions (namely, that a moral fabric is woven into the universe and that man, despite his best efforts and often good intentions, is inherently weak and easily corruptible, which is why attempts at social engineering are doomed to fail). But to those who are open to Johnson's particular angle, Modern Times will prove to be an informative and enlightening read. If I had to take a multiple choice test on it right now, I would likely score no better than a 9%, and I probably still can't find the Republic of Djibouti on a map. So, you might be wondering why I devoted four months of my life to reading this long, boring book. What I can say is that the impoverished picture of the 20th century that I had in my mind prior reading this book has now been edified and enriched, and most importantly, it gave me a solid foundation onto which I will hopefully build.

First, my main criticism...actually, my only criticism. Only twenty chapters in a book of 784 pages of text makes this a difficult book to work through. (In addition to 66 pages of notes and 29 of index.) Chapters of thirty and forty pages without even page breaks on a topic as complex as world politics gets mighty tedious and confusing at times. I can't even count the number of times I started into a new paragraph, and then after a few sentences had to return to the previous paragraph trying to figure out what I missed. The topics change that fast, and that completely. One second we are talking about something or someone in one part of the world, and the next sentence we are on to a new locale and cast of characters entirely.

For this I fault the publisher and not the author. I don't care if the author submitted this work with NO chapters, it is the publisher's responsibility to organize it in a digestible fashion. These twenty chapters should have been UNITS, each divided into at least five or six chapters. As a reader, I like to thumb ahead a few pages to see if I'm close to the end of a chapter or at least near a page break, and as such will continue on so as to complete the train of thought. With this book, that is impossible.

That said, the actual history as written by Paul Johnson is simply stunning in it's detail of not only events and characters, but also the personalities and intricacies of said events and characters. And the writing itself is perfectly comprehensible. As a history buff, I had taken so many History electives in college that I inadvertently ended up with a minor. And yet, so much of what Johnson has written is absolutely news to me. I was continually amazed by how little I actually knew about some of the major historical events of the last century and in particular, the cast of characters responsible. Unfortunately, the RE-writing of history by academics bears a great deal of the blame. Or, as in the case of the legacy media today, much of it was simply never discussed or reported on, effectively sweeping huge swaths of it under the rug.

If this book was a bit more user-friendly logistically, this should be required course material in every college and university in this country, if not the world.

This is one of the most profound and dense books I have ever read. Anyone that has read Paul Johnson knows that he has a very complex stream of conciseness style of writing. It is a very dense, heavy, and fast paced read that requires a lot of focus. The amount of information being conveyed to the reader is staggering. I saw one Amazon review by Leib Gershon Mitchell that said “The amount of information is like trying to drink water through a fire hose”, which I found hilarious and spot on. Also, like most other reviewers, I have to mentioned that the editorial job of this book could have been better by creating more breaks within the chapters - there are none and each chapter is 25-40 pages long. Johnson, switches gears very quickly and will sometimes have you wondering why he didn’t address a certain issue or topic, only to lead up to it in a very clever roundabout way - almost as if he has a complete birds-eye-view type mastery of the information he wants to convey from start to finish, and what directions or paths he would like to choose to get there. The title of this book is a little misleading because it pretty much starts at the very beginning of the 20th century, while frequently referencing the 19th century to bring some context into the events occurring at the onset of the 20th century, and then goes into great depth with the events of WW1 and the Bolshevik Revolution. Anyone who wants an excellent uncensored history of the 20th century (and some 19th century) that you won’t get from the legacy media or much of academia, look no further than “Modern Times”.

Johnson makes the history of the 20th century not only readable, but exciting. Frequently, I found it to be as much of a page-turner as good fiction. Johnson makes sense of a time that was confusing even to those of us who lived through part of it. It is not always immediately clear what is happening in world events because of the bias of the reporting and the limited information that is available at the time. With time, more information comes to light and what happened can be analyzed without the emotion of the moment. Some of the reviews that discredit Johnson's history as a conservative view fail to take into account how skewed the reporting at the time was and how limited or one sided the information was. Between the two world wars, there was a general moment of the American and European intelligentsia away from capitalism and toward socialism, government planning, and social engineering. Because of the the depression, it was easy to convince people that capitalism had failed and the new Russian plan lead by Stalin was the way of the future. Unfortunately, few Americans knew of the horrors taking place inside Russian since information was so tightly controlled. It wasn't until generations later that even part of the truth became known. Since this isn't generally taught, it is easy to see why many people would have a hard time accepting these revelations. However you decide, its very thought provoking to see history from a different perspective.

I highly recommend this book to everyone who loves history or just wants to make better sense of what is happening in the world today.

This 784 page book reads very well and is an in-depth History of what went on from the End of WWI through the End of the Cold War (in the Early 1990s). This covers most of the leading nations of the World, including the US, the UK, Russia, China, Japan, Germany and pre-WWII Italy. Even the post colonial Emerging World receives a strong focus as the Century proceeds.

As únicas críticas cabíveis são as dimensões do livro. Por conter quase 850 páginas em uma edição pequena as letras são pequenas também o que pode incomodar alguns leitores.

Paul Johnson is a talented writer and pens his books in a style and format that crosses the boundary between History and Journalism. The effect is to bring history alive for the masses and for those who might normally dismiss history as dull

Even those who are not interested in history will enjoy this book.The massive scope of this work is impressive.

This book would be great for anyone who desires to spark the interest of history in those who have no desire to study it....(i.e., history teachers and their bored students)

Paul Johnson combines two qualities hard to find in today's historical works - readability and a theocentric world view. He challenges the reader to interpret the facts honestly, abandoning past stereotypes and biases. A fascinating overview of our century. I hope it's updated for the rest of the 1990's. A must read for anyone with an interest in modern history. Secular humanists may not like some of Johnson's conclusions.

AWESOME

'We are as old as the hills than neighter spends time nor waste it' - How one feels after reading a beautiful and well informed book such as this.

very dense read - wonderful!