RITES OF SPRING; THE GREAT WAR AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN AGE Modris Eksteins Toronto, Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989. 396pp, cloth, $26.95 ISBN 0-88619-200-5. CIP Grades 12 and up/Ages 17 and up Reviewed by John Harkness. Volume 17 Number 4 1989 July This is one of the most fascinating interpretations of World War I I have read in ages. Almost for the first time I realize that maybe this war was not so senseless after all! Eksteins turns away from the military, political and "textbook" focus of the war and its causes to focus on the cultural phenomena of the period. He begins and ends with a dance, the "incredible," "scandalous" and "provocative" Stravinsky-Nijinski-Diaghilev ballet moderns, Le sacre du printemps, which opened in Paris on May 29, 1913, to great shock, surprise and controversy. The volume ends with macabre events in Adolf Hitler's Berlin bunker. As the Fuhrer was about to shoot himself, his orderlies and attendants danced in an adjoining cafeteria to a German song popular in 1945, "It is Spring without End." In between these two strange dances, Eksteins enlightens us on the origins and meanings of the Great War and the inevitable culture clash that lay behind it. We learn much about major cultural figures such as Diaghilev and Nijinski before the war and Erich Maria Remarque after the war. The author concludes by fitting the rise and fall of Hitler and his Third Reich into his schema. This is indeed a breath-taking and authoritative reappraisal of modernism and though it takes concentrated reading, I recommend it heartily to any student of this crazy twentieth century in which we live. The volume is enriched with sixteen pages of black-and-white photographs, thirty-two pages of careful footnotes, a selected bibliography, and a comprehen­sive index. John Harkness, Emery C.I., North York, Ont.