THE AGE OF ASTONISHMENT

The history of a century through the eyes of an ordinary man who lived through it.

Journalist Morris holds a low opinion of recent decades. “The difference between a buggy and a jet,” he writes, “is far greater than the difference between the rotary phones I grew up using and the smart phone I use today.” He maintains that the true miracle century was 1870-1970, and he makes a convincing case through the biography of his grandfather John Morris (1863-1955). His imaginative “mongrel” approach—“a mix of…biography, history, reportage, memoir, autobiography, and, when the record runs thin, speculation that flirts with fiction”—is successful. John was born into a slave-owning Virginia family. The end of the Civil War led to the departure of most of the plantation workers, so his father took a job as professor of English at the University of Georgia. Son John entered college in 1879 and proved an avid scholar while Thomas Edison and others were launching “the golden age of the independent American inventor.” John, an obsessive newspaper reader, undoubtedly soaked up these developments. After graduation, he drifted before deciding to attend the University of Berlin, where he discovered his life’s work: philology. His career as a professor writing scholarly articles for obscure journals does not seem like material for a page-turner, but his modest life, in contrast with the turbulent outside world, makes for an engaging read. Throughout his life, the South was afflicted with virulent racism, lynchings, and the KKK. Though John supported Black rights, he wondered if a “White man in the South [could]…help Blacks rise?” The author cuts away regularly to recount other historical elements that were prominent in his grandfather’s life: electric light, flush toilets, the creation of modern medicine, radio, movies, TV, automobiles, two world wars, and the atomic bomb. Though the author offers few novel insights, he does a superb job of recounting a life amid a series of significant decades.

An entertaining combination of domestic and world history.