Masthead
One of my photos

The Noughties by Tim Footman

November 18th, 2009 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

I have just finished the last book in my supply of freebies from Amazon’s Vine programme.  It is a history of the decade 2000-2009 called The Noughties by Tim Footman.  Like somebody hearing a World Trade Centre joke on September 12th 2001, my first reaction on seeing it was “too soon” so I approached it with very low expectations.

It turned out to be a lot better than I feared.   It would be very easy to knock up a quick book by filling it with key things like iPods, YouTube, Obama and then dropping in some extremely recent references like Michael Jackson’s death and Spotify to try and distract from the fact that the decade still had months to run when the book was finished.  Granted, those things are all in here, but at least the author has tried to put some structure to it, backed up by some research so there is more substance than I anticipated.

Here is what I said about it on Amazon:

This book works better than it should do.  On the face of it, writing a retrospective of a decade before the ten years are even up is a preposterous proposition, but as long as nothing huge and significant happens in the next six weeks Tim Footman does sum up the time as well as anybody can in such a short book.

About the length: the book is 220 pages, but about 40 of them at the end are given over to footnotes and three appendices (new words coined in the decade, a list of notable deaths, and a further reading list.) I would have preferred the footnotes to have been at the foot of pages instead of being lumped together at the back: some of them are very good but I soon gave up flicking backwards and forwards and read them at the end instead of in context.

All of that leaves 180 pages – an average of 18 per year – but somehow the main points get covered in that space.

The book is not a chronological history, but is split into ten chapters, each focusing on a different theme from 9/11 as the defining moment (and arguably the real start) of the decade to the credit crunch via the war on terror, climate change, celebrity culture, web 2.0, surveillance culture, shopping, music technology and globalisation.

It is too soon to be able to get a proper perspective on the 2000’s, even if such a concept is valid, but nevertheless it is interesting to be reminded of the main events, and it is written in an easy-going and readable style. Just don’t expect anything too in-depth and academic; any of the topics here could easily be expanded to 200 pages on their own without exhausting them.

To put it in some sort of perspective, Andy Bennett’s excellent book about Britain in the 1970s took nearly 600 pages to primarily describe the main political and social events in one decade, with the benefit of thirty years of distance. The Noughties attempts to squeeze the political, social, scientific and cultural events of the world into a third of the number of pages while the decade is still in progress.

There will be much better stories of the decade written in the future, but this one is as good as you are going to get right now, and a lot better than it should be.

Tags: ··

No Comments so far ↓

Like the collective mind of the Daily Mail, comments are closed.