Stephen Kern conducts an innovative examination of the way in which new perceptions of time and space influenced ideas, philosophies, art forms, behavior, politics, and foreign relations. Kern is able to connect such seemingly unrelated topics as the sinking of the RMS Titanic and Friedrich Nietzche's evaluation of the present (an approach he calls "conceptual distance") to create a better understanding of the changing attitudes concerning time and space at the turn of the twentieth century. As Kern points out, the study of such an array of diverse cultural elements in terms of temporal and spatial experiences is essential because time and space are universal. All peoples experience time and space. Ultimately, he explains how the changing notions of time and space culminated in the diplomatic breakdown which led to the First World War.

This study is very intriguing, but there are weaknesses in his many conclusions. On the cinema, for example, certainly, it was exciting for viewers to see, for the first time, a man running backwards on the screen; however, it is difficult to take from such experiences the assertion that viewers changed their attitudes regarding time outside the theatre. Although some memebers of the audience indeed ducked at the sight of an oncoming locomotive on the screen, one must assume that viewers were able to distinguish between what they saw in the theatres and their experiences in real life. More convincing is Kern's argument that the cinema promoted a sense of temporal world unity (displaying a global sense of time through newsreels, etc.).

His main argument regarding the July crisis is also a little weak. Briefly, Kerns maintains that the preoccupation with speed (especially with the fast, impersonal telegraph) caused diplomacy to fail due to rapid, ill-considered responses to events (the assassiantion of Archduke Ferdinand) and the short time limit given to the Serbian government to respond to Austria's ultimatum. Certainly there were failures in diplomacy before the telegraph. Moreover, it could be argued that the telegraph had the potential of making accidental conflicts less likely than before because it allowed for immediate decisions to be made by governments at home rather than by military officers and soldiers abroad (i.e. the Cuban Missile Crisis, although this was--of course--outside of Kern's period of study). It is also a little hard to swallow that the wonderful technological, philosophical, cultural advances and changes of this period were steering the world to an irreversible path of destruction.

Despite these weaknesses, this work is a must have for students of this period because it covers such a broad range of topics and links them into an intriguing and ambitious theory. It really prompted me to think about this period (my favorite period of history) with a very broad brush.

The book is a superb general cultural history of the turn of the century period that relates developments in culture and society to new technologies of transportation and communication. He divides the period into subtopics of time and space, as the major chapters focus on changing ways people experienced past, present, future, speed, form, distance, and direction. Two concluding chapters examine how the changing experiences and ideas about time and space in the prewar period shaped World War I--first a chapter on "The Temporality of the July Crisis" and a final chapter, "The Cubist War." The overall aregument is that these new technologies forced a new set of values on the Western world, one which Kern calls a rehierarchization of earlier cultural forms. Kern sees these new technologies as moving society in the direction of greater democracy, a leveling of older aristocratic hegemony, and a secularization of life and thought.

In reading this remarkable book, one should not forget that it is a widow's memoir, not an historical work. Anna Larina was but a child when she fell in love with the charismatic Nikolai Bukharin, one of the inner circle of Bolshevik intellectuals who seized control of Russia during the October Revolution in 1917. When they married, she was a beautiful Russian girl barely out of her teens and Bukharin was a celebrated national figure of 43. They had a very short married life together before Bukharin was swept into Stalin's counter-revolutionary net with trumped-up charges that he was plotting an anti-Bolshevik takeover including a plan to assassinate Stalin himself. This culminated in the celebrated "Moscow Show Trials" of the 1930's where Bukharin "confessed" his guilt and was executed.

All this is written about from the horrified wife's perspective and it makes an absorbing narrative, indeed. It was not enough for the Stalinist Communists of that era to imprison the accused. They imprisoned the family of the accused as well. Being the wife of a counter-revolutionist was a crime in Communist Russia. And so -- off to imprisonment or exile. That Anna's and Bukharin's son was only a year old at the time, made no difference to the proletarian authority. The child was taken from the mother's arms and finally was raised in foster homes. It took 20 years before mother and son were reunited. The scene describing the reunion of the mother with her lost son is one of the many high points of her book. Anna's vivid descriptions of her life in squalid, filthy prisons she was sent to over the years is reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's work. Yet, somehow she did not fully convey the intense moral outrage of such an unjust treatment. Perhaps, that is because she had to learn to suppress those feelings to keep alive, to hang on to sanity.

In her view, it was not Bolshevism but Stalin who was the villain. He is everyone's villain in post-communist Russia. Anna Larina makes no effort to soften her feelings for the dictator who once had been a friend of Bukharin's but who finally did him in.

She argues Bukharin's innocence not as a lawyer would but with all the emotion of a wife whose husband, son and youth were stolen unjustly from her by one of the Century's most vicious despots.

I highly recommend this book to be read after obtaining a more historical perspective in Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution : A Political Biography, 1888-1938 by Stephen F. Cohen who, incidentally, penned the introduction to Anna Larina's most interesting and memorable book.

This is one of the most haunting books I have ever read. Larina provides a window into one of the most disturbing periods of modern history. The reader will find himself (or herself) drawn into the madness that was Stalin's system of terror of the 1930's. The author's survival of the purges, and her determined faith in her doomed husband, are a testimony to the spirit of the Russian people.