The German Genius
"A virtuosic cultural history of German ideas and influence, from 1750 to the present day"-- Provided by publisher.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
3mentions
3people
2013–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The German Genius is an 850 page marathon (excluding notes) by Peter Watson who's not an academic but an ex NYT/Sunday Times journalist and it shows. It's a brilliantly readable unputdownable (in my view) account of how, in a reviewers words, a ton of Germans from the 17th to the early 20th century 'have done more than anything else to create the modern West'. It also offers a fascinating account of how the later appalling developments in the early 1900s onward came about so disastrously. If you only browse the book in a bookshop, read the three pages of comments from reviewers! Last word to Peter Watson 'The United States and Great Britain may speak English but more than they know, they think German'.
- For English-speakers unfamiliar with famous Germans, I mildly recommend The German Genius. This book was written in 2010. It covers the last 200-300 years of famous Germans and their contributions to science, the arts and politics.
While it's an awesome book and a really good introduction to Germany, I can only "mildly" recommend it because it's 800 pages of short biographies. It took me 6 months to finish. It's a bit of a slog.
- It is not title fetishism, it is quality control and it is very good. This means that when you want to have someone working for you, you can be ensured the person as the adequate formation. I am French, having spent a couple of years now in Germany, some in Denmark and before some times in the US, I can tell you this is wonderful. If you need someone to fix something in your house, you can be sure he knows about it. Not like in the US where the guy was turning steaks at McDo before and just happen to now do plumbing for a small company because "He did well at the interview".
This level of "quality control" is everywhere in the German society.
For the titles themselves, this comes from the general German culture, I heavily recommend "The German Genius" by Peter Watson to understand it a bit more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Ladd-t.html?p...
http://www.amazon.de/German-Genius-Renaissance-Scientific-Re...
