the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere", and that "it has pursued characteristic purposes - that is its unity - and now these purposes, carried out to their utmost possibility, are bringing about its demise." The front cover image is a detail from The Romans in their Decadence, an 1848 painting by Thomas Couture. Reception From Dawn to Decadence received considerable notice in the literary and popular press upon its release. Newsweek, in its review, described Barzun as "the last of the great polymath scholars" and praised the book as "the damnedest story you'll ever read", while noting minor displeasure with Barzun's "mandarin snippiness" about modern-day cultural life and a "few trifling errors". The Guardian said the work was "a history of ideas, not a historical narrative; it is an interpretation, not a description of what happened". The review praised Barzun for writing in "a light, lucid, epigrammatic style", but described his judgments of historical figures as "at best otiose and...[at times] ludicrously banal." In the New York Times, William Everdell said the book was "encyclopedic without being discontinuous" and "peerless - on every century but [the twentieth]", chiding Barzun for minor errors and for "writ[ing] the history of liberalism as if democracy had not improved it." First Things remarked, "We get assessments, sometimes quite idiosyncratic ones, of almost all the great names of the modern era, but many of the biographies are of persons the author deems worthy-but-obscure." Roger Kimball reviewed the book for The New Criterion, adjudging the book "a magnificent summa of his concerns as a thinker and historian." References 2000 non-fiction books HarperCollins books Books about the West