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From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural LifeBook

by Jacques Barzun

Who uses, recommends or left From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Razib Khan
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
loved

Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.

Khan's New Year 'Time Well Spent' post, a short list of books that have stood up to repeat reading for him. He notes that Stuart Ritchie is a friend.

2026-01-01·razibkhan.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.