The Education of Henry Adams (Henry Adams, 1907)

Ranked by the Modern Library in 1998 as the No. 1 American nonfiction book.

I was interested for several additional reasons. This book had discussed Adams in the context of the change starting circa 1900 (and the power of the "dynamo"). Also, I've done almost no reading from this period other than fiction.

In the end, though, I wasn't all that moved, so obviously I was missing something. I read this is described as an "odd" book, and I agree.

Adams had an absolutely unique perch. Starting with his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, who walked him to school, etc. He worked with his father as a diplomat in Britain during the Civil War (when Britain was flirting with the Confederacy). Apparently knew all the US politicians during the period, up to and including a dozen or so presidents.

Adams spent tons of time in Europe; loved the cathedrals; focused on 13th century; Chartres and Mont St. Michel. In Europe in 1870. Tried to make sense of Darwin.

"Between the Civil War and World War I, an old world began to die. Some were aware of it. Others weren’t. Still others knew but labored mightily to pretend, deny, hold it off. Nevertheless, as history will, the change came, and after it blew past, all was different. What we call “the modern world”—a world of politics, technology and attitudes we’re still largely living in—had arrived. . . In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams, readiest of the unready, wrote about what it was like to live through the change, in the change, trying and failing to understand the change. Privately printed in 1907, it was not generally published until after his death in 1918; it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. . . .The climax of the book is the famous chapter titled “The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900),” in which Adams beholds the coming role of technological power in human life. He sees the steam turbines at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and writes that for him “... the dynamo became a symbol of infinity.” As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the 40-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. ... “Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.” . . . He sees the dynamo as a symbol of force itself, of the gods of the future, as distinct from the Virgin, the spirit of the past, reflected in the urge to the arts and philosophy, an urge Adams feels may be swallowed up by the surge of the dynamo."