People Of The Century: One Hundred Men And Women Who Shaped The Last One Hundred Years [AUDIOBOOK] (Audio Cassette)

~ Editors of Time-Life Books (Author), Dan Rather (Narrator), Brian Dennehy (Narrator), Olympia Dukakis (Narrator), Victor Garber (Narrator), Lynne Thigpen (Narrator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Millenniumism is upon us: the editors of Time magazine and CBS News have amassed an engaging, if mostly predictable, overview of the most important women and men of the past century. Though there are a few questionable choices (why, for example, is Pope John Paul II included, when John XXIII is not? Why does Richard Rodgers make an appearance here and not George Gershwin? Where is D.W. Griffith? Elvis? Frank Lloyd Wright?), generally the selections make senseAeven Bart Simpson as Number 99. The writing and opinions mostly range from the reverent (William F. Buckley on Pope John Paul II or Peter Gay on Sigmund Freud) to the fawning (Peggy Noonan on Ronald Reagan). But every now and then the collection offers a pleasant surprise: Salman Rushdie presents an unromantic view of Mohandas Gandhi and Indian history that is filled with surprising facts; Reeve Lindbergh deals forthrightly and honestly with the isolationist and anti-Semitic views of her father, Charles Lindbergh. Other entries avoid the thorny issues: Lee Iacocca downplays Henry Ford's anti-Semitism and his union busting, although Iacocca's view is balanced somewhat by Irving Bluestone's astute piece on Walter Reuther, which features a photograph of the labor leader bloodied by Ford's goons. Lavishly illustrated, this is a fin de si?cle coffee-table book, but not a comprehensive history. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

This gracious, though seriously unbalanced, farewell to the departing century presents biographical sketches of 100 political leaders, artists, scientists, and tycoons who left an indelible mark on the modern age. The price some figures had to pay for the honor of inclusion was to share space with their nemeses. Freud, Hitler, Einstein, Mao, Sakharov, Lenin, Anne Frank, Ayatullah Khomeini, the Beatles, and others become strange bedfellows in a volume distinguished at once by literary refinement (its contributors include Elie Wiesel, Harold Bloom, and Amos Oz) and occasional stylistic infelicities and ideologically biased evaluations. Russian storyteller Tatyana Tolstaya offers a syrupy endorsement of Gorbachev, the man who failed in both communism and democracy, contending that although Gorbachev was not ``particularly honest, fair, or noble, he deserves love and respect because his successors turned out much worse. By contrast, Salman Rushdie's re-evaluation of the ``ambiguous nature of [Gandhi's] achievement and legacy'' is remarkably balanced, as it strips a major 20th-century icon of his immunity to criticism and considers both the grandeur of his teachings and their unresponsiveness to the needs of India and the world at large. Despite David Gelernter's attempts to portray Bill Gates as a mere ``technological groupie'' with a single talent ``for being at the right place at the right time, Gates is the only person to claim space here as both subject and author, praising the Wright Brothers in his own essay for building the first superhighway in the sky. The collections obvious drawbacks are its marked Amer-Eurocentrism and its blind optimism about the world entering ``the third millenium as a wiser place. Perhaps Bart Simpson should have been memorialized along with Gagarin, Chagall, and Fellini. Its geographical and cultural bias makes this a peculiarly parochial valediction to the departing century. (Photos) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio; Adaptation edition (November 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671788523
• ISBN-13: 978-0671788520
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,872,331 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written and interesting though a biased list of greats, December 27, 1999

By	Doug Vaughn (Washington, Dc USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: People of the Century: One Hundred Men And Women Who Shaped The Last One Hundred Years (Hardcover)

This presentation of 100 great people of the century (as selected by the editors of TIME) is noteworthy both for its bias and limited scope - it is heavy on Americans and late 20th century personalities - and for its writing. Each person is presented to the reader through an essay, and most of these essays are not capsule biographies so much as meditations on the nature of the person and his/her influence. The strange pairing of certain authors and subjects (Elie Wiesel on Adolf Hitler or Salman Rushdie on Mohandas K. Ghandi) allow for some interesting insights and speculation. More sympathetic pairings of author and subject (George Plimpton on Muhammad Ali, Rita Dove on Rosa Parks, Philip Glass on Igor Stravinsky) offer equally interesting, though less speculative, pieces that are quite fun to read.

Overall, the quality of writing in the book is quite high, and even when it isn't (as, for example in Bill Gate's essay on the Wright brothers or Lee Iacocca on Henry Ford) the insights of the author - because of who and what they are - allow the ideas to take on a level of significance that makes up for so-so skills as an essayist.

I received this as a Christmas present and spent most of Christmas day reading through all the essays. It provided a very pleasant way to review the century we are leaving. My one regret with the book is the inclusion of a few subjects that simply don't belong (Brue Lee, Bart Simpson? )which necessarily restricted the field that could be included. It is, of course, a personal bias and everyone will have their own take on who should or should not have been represented, but in the entire list there is only one novelist, one poet, one composer, one painter; yet there are numerous political and military figures. Understandable in terms of overt impact on history, but it sells the cultural aspects of the century short._

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars People of the Century, December 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: People of the Century: One Hundred Men And Women Who Shaped The Last One Hundred Years (Hardcover)

It¹s countdown time whether we face it or not. And the bestsellers prove it. We¹ve encountered books predicting happenings for the millennium we¹re about to greet and books listing people, businesses, music, inventions, events that have made impacts during the millennium we¹re leaving. In addition to Life: Our Century in Pictures and Russell Ash¹s The Top 10 of Everything 2000, there are seemingly 1000 collections about these 1000 years. One book worth looking at is PEOPLE OF THE CENTURY with a forward by Dan Rather of CBS and an afterward by Walter Isaacson of Time Magazine. The compilation features 100 men and women who influenced the century, rather than the millennium.We reunite with leaders, artists, and intellectuals who gave us rock Œn¹ roll,jazz, flight; shopping malls, existentialism, bytes; splitting the atom, penicillin, cloning of sheep, and Bob Dylan. Those writing the profiles with reputability include William F, Buckley, Rita Dove, Molly Ivins, Roger Rosenblatt, and Deborah Tannen. Descriptions of the contributors appear in the index along with photo credits, nicely referenced. We readily expect some profiles: Henry Ford, Anne Frank, James Joyce, Rosa Parks, Theodore Roosevelt, and Igor Stravinsky, We might have forgotten others: Sigmund Freud (as profiled by Peter Gay) and Leo Baekeland, the maker of plastics who moved to the U.S. from Belgium in 1889. We ask ³why?² of others. For example, Hitler is included, as is Bart Simpson. Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel bluntly admits how frightening it was to write of Hitler. And some readers might bluntly admit how foolish it is to read about ³forever 10,² make-believe Bart Simpson. Others might question ever-lovin¹ Oprah being among the 100, but the criteria put her on the list. PEOPLE OF THE CENTURY concerns people who ³cast a long shadow.² We are refreshed by some inclusions: Emmeline Pankhurst, for instance, reminds us of the women¹s-right-to-vote, which she achieved for England in 1918 (2 years before America¹s in 1920.) The book is arranged chronologically, beginning in 1903 in nearby Kitty Hawk and moving poignantly to 1989 with the ³unknown,² lone ³everyman² in Tiananmen Square. In this compact history, people are profiled as well as pictured with a ³life-at -a glance² bio. The index needs improvement ( so that readers can more easily locate people by their fields) and so do Dan Rather mixed metaphors. ( The new age is ³taking flight² and becoming a ³rough draft.²) Also Paul Rudnick could use poetic sensitivity when writing about Marilyn Monroe. He callously groups her with American commodities of Coca-cola and Levis. Isaacson¹s afterward reminds us of the century¹s lessons: ³freedom won² and not the pursuit of ³material abundance² but the nurturing of ³the dignity and values of each individual.² Obviously some of these lessons were learned the hard way. PEOPLE OF THE CENTURY reminds us to repeat the goodness of our history, repel the other, and to think as we close this year, this century, this millennium.

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a total misfire, November 24, 2007

By	Anyechka (Rensselaer, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: People of the Century: One Hundred Men And Women Who Shaped The Last One Hundred Years (Hardcover)

Lists such as these are always going to be subjective and hotly debated by people who disagree with them, but for the most part, I think this list was pretty solid. Along with a lot of the usual suspects, such as Sigmund Freud, FDR, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein (who went on to be named as TIME's Person of the Century), Hitler, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Mao Zedong, there are numerous people who aren't always considered for lists such as these, such as Pete Rozelle, Harvey Milk, Juan Trippe, Willis Carrier, A.P. Giannini, Leo Burnett, and Bill W. I had actually never heard of a number of these people, but as the essays showed, they did some pretty important and influential things in spite of how their fame might be overshadowed by that of more obvious people of the past century.

However, there were more than a few glaring omissions. I'm utterly floored that Stalin was left off of this list; how could anyone not consider him one of the most important people of the century? Or Elvis, Drs. Gregory Goodwin Pincus and John Rock (inventors of the birth control pill, easily one of the most important inventions of the century), Pope John XXIII, Pol Pot, Babe Ruth, Fidel Castro, Mussolini (another huge omission!), or John Logie Baird and Charles Jenkins (inventors of television)? As someone quite interested in antique televisions, I was extraordinarily disappointed that in neither the essays for David Sarnoff nor Philo Farnsworth were these men or their mechanical scanning-disc televisions, which were actually a lot more common in the late Twenties and early Thirties than most people have been led to believe, mentioned. Essays like these only perpetuate the myth that the history of television only begins in 1939 with the debut of electronic television. The essay on Louis B. Mayer also reported as fact that old urban legend about Clark Gable running someone over and then having it covered up by the studio while someone else went to jail in his place. Fortunately, most of the essays seemed to be free of such urban legends and incomplete history.

The majority of the essays also seemed to be rather fair and balanced, addressing the shortcomings of the subject instead of just endlessly praising them as demigods. Only a couple were like the one for the Kennedys, seeming more empty and unspecific instead of in-depth and giving us real reasons why this person or group should be considered one of the greatest people of the century. I'm a fan of the Kennedys, and even I thought that one was rather shallow and vapid! On the opposite end of the spectrum, Peggy Noonan's essay on Ronald Reagan (possibly the book's longest by far) was obnoxiously sycophantic. Contrary to what some people think, the man was not some sort of demigod. Even though I'm on the completely opposite political page from him, I do have to agree he was one of the century's most important people. I just wish a more impartial person had been found to write the essay on him, addressing his negative aspects (such as creating the homeless problem, ignoring the AIDS crisis till his presidency was almost over, the Bitburg fiasco) along with his more positive aspects (such as helping to end the Cold War and making Americans feel proud of themselves again). And along with the glaring omissions, a number of the people selected were just bizarre. How are we supposed to believe that Bruce Lee, Princess Diana, Pelé, Steven Spielberg, or Oprah are among the most important folks of the past century? In serious commparison to people like Dr. Jonas Salk, Jackie Robinson, the Leakeys, Walt Disney, and Eleanor Roosevelt? Important and influential in a certain decade or a certain field, certainly, but in terms of the overall century?! It's also way too soon to fairly evaluate the true importance of some of the people in the final section of the book. And why was there no index?

In spite of the shortcomings, this is a pretty good book through and through if you're interested in 20th century history (however Western-centric most of the book is) and some of the personalities who made the past century so eventful.