Inventing Modern

Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern, John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern. Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco, skyscrapers, Fritz Lang''s Metropolis, Buck Rogers, the culture of the open road--Burma Shave, Kerouac, and Wh...