Customer Reviews

LIFE: Century of Change: America in Pictures 1900-2000

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It only took a few moments with this book to realize that it was a waste of money. Mr. Stolley seems to have a politically correct agenda which he is seeking to push as opposed to a sense of the changes and events that were important to America in the 20th Century. How anyone can purport to present a photographic history of America without sections on the following (to suggest a few) is more than I can understand: The Wright Brothers and Aviation, WWI and WWII, The Bomb and the Arms Race, The McCarthy Witch Hunts, Sputnik and the Race to the Moon, The Civil Rights Movement, Viet Nam, Watergate

If you buy a book with "LIFE" imprinted on the cover, you know you're going to get a quality product for your buck, and this is especially true if you're a connoisseur of fine photographs.

Such is the case with Century of Change, a big (nearly 400-page) book that is meant as a companion volume to America In Pictures.

This volume attempts to show us how we changed in the last millennium and does that in ten sections that muse about and illustrate the themes: the home, machines, life span and medical advances, design, family, shopping and the consumer economy, sex, celebrity, entertainment and racial and ethnic diversity.

The book delivers with its photos, cutlines, layout and overall organization.

But it gets all knotted up when we get to the important introductory text to each section. The editor, Richard Stolley, selected academic eggheads to write these pieces, and most of them read like bad chapters in bad textbooks. The text is a bona fide excursion into pretentious gobbledygook, guaranteed to give you a headache.

Enjoy the pictures, but get out the bottle of Tylenol if you plan to read the introductions to each section.

In typical fashion, the people of LIFE magazine have put out another incredible book that uses pictures and words to bring to life both the incredible and the normal facets of 20th century America. Pictures often communicate better than words, and this book only reinforces this point. We remember pictures. They stick with us. They pass on stories, and they allow us who now live in the 21st century to experience, in a little way, the past that got us to where we are now.

Life Magazine has always done a great job of presenting different images of AMerica.the Pictures have always captured the changing faces of our times.a great overview of history&People that have impacted Society.