Vienna

How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

By: Richard Cockett

Narrated by: Gareth Richards

Length: 14 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West's intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century?

Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna.

The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, and Klimt was the melting pot at the heart of a vast metropolitan empire. But with the Second World War and the rise of fascism, the dazzling coteries of thinkers who squabbled, debated, and called Vienna home dispersed across the world, where their ideas continued to have profound impact.

Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of this extraordinary story. Tracing Vienna's rich intellectual history from psychoanalysis to Reaganomics, Cockett encompasses everything from the communist rebels of Red Vienna to the neoliberal economists of the Austrian School. This is the panoramic account of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.

©2023 Richard Cockett (P)2023 Tantor

Fascinating book, extremely poor narration

This book is so well written with so many insights into 20th century thinking and inventions, but the narrator was the frustratingly wrong choice for this book. The amount of utterly mispronounced German words and names is shocking for a professionally produced audiobook for sale. Even the German word for Vienna (“Wien”) is repeatedly mispronounced by this narrator. In addition, the English parts of this book are read in a stilted, robotic way with awkward emphasis of random words. I highly recommend reading this book but avoid the audiobook.