Richard Stolley knows a bit about what we want from the pictures of our century. He's the LIFE magazine guy who acquired the Zapruder film of JFK being shot (the fatal instant is depicted in this book), and he basically created modern celebrity culture as the founding father of People, where he articulated his famous rules for cover photos: young is better than old, pretty better than ugly, rich better than poor--"and nothing is better than the celebrity dead." All of the above are found abundantly in Stolley and Tony Chiu's lively, cannily selected, and sumptuously produced photo album LIFE: Our Century in Pictures.

It's not just a grab bag of 770 arresting, touching, scary, funny, alternately famous and unfamiliar images. It tells a semi-coherent story by breaking up the century into nine "epochs," each introduced with a brief essay by a leading intellectual light (David M. Kennedy, Paul Fussell, and Garry Wills do especially well). There are fun facts aplenty: did you know Columbia Pictures' Lady Liberty-like logo was inspired by a debutante in an anti-Hun propaganda poster? Or that Ike almost chose Margaret Chase Smith instead of Nixon? Each epoch gets assigned a "Turning Point," sometimes a defining moment or a flashy burst of upbeat cultural documentary to offset the sometimes stark violent-event photos. The World War I section breaks up the black-and-white trench-fighting scenes with a quickie history of the American musical, pages as radiant as a rainbow. Each chapter ends with "Requiem" photos of people whose passing is still news.

The layouts are often superb: you have to open the book to see how perfect a Mondrian looks next to a photo of college girls doing patriotic calisthenics that transform them into a similarly energetic grid. There are heftier historic-photo collections, like Bruce Bernard's true test of coffee-table construction, the 1,120-page Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering, and Hope. But you're not going to find a more popular book of its kind than Stolley and Chiu's. --Tim Appelo


Book Description
Drawing from LIFE magazine and the greatest photo archives of our time, this book chronicles our century by way of an unparalleled collection of photographs. There are more than 770 spellbinding images-chosen from the 50,000-plus pictures that were reviewed-within these pages. They show significant events and people most responsible for shaping our world and culture during the last 100 years. Many are classic photographs from LIFE, burned deep into the memory of this nation; others are remarkable prints not seen for generations. Together they create the ultimate LIFE book-the most fascinating pictorial history of the last 10 decades ever published.


About the Author
Richard B. Stolley is Senior Editorial Adviser at Time Inc. A native of Pekin, Illinois, and graduate of Northwester University, he began practicing journalism at age 15. After working at three newspapers, he joined the staff of the weekly LIFE magazine in 1953 and for 19 years covered events and personalities throughout the world. Most memorable among these stories was the death of President John F. Kennedy; Stolley discovered and obtained exclusively for LIFE the famous Zapruder film of the assassination. In 1974, he was the founding editor of People magazine. After eight years there, he was named editor of the monthly LIFE and then editorial director of all Time Inc. magazines. He assumed his present position in 1993.


Excerpted from LIFE : Our Century in Pictures by Richard B. Stolley, Tony Chiu. Copyright © 0. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Dust Bowls and Other Dreams DON'T LOOK BACK, Satchel Paige advised, something may be gaining on you. Those of us who produced this book had no choice. While everyone else seemed to be breaking out party hats for the next millennium, we were steeping ourselves in the final century of the one fast slipping by. Other fine books about the century use images to supplement the text. We went at the job the other way around. We were determined to tell the story in photographs. Our book has important words, of course ;nine provocative essays by distinguished authors, information-rich captions for each of the 770 or so photographs. But we wanted pictures to carry the narrative; we felt that Americans today are visually sophisticated enough to read photographs and fully comprehend the information and emotion they impart. As our title promises, this is truly a picture history of the last 100 years. We have divided the century into nine epochs, our book into nine chapters. We tell the story as the world lived it, chronologically. Within each epoch is a special section called Turning Point. Here, we put a key event in context by looking back in time at its antecedents, as well as forward in time to assess its impact. And following each epoch is Requiem, a roll call of some important newsmakers, especially cultural ones, who died during those years. Deciding which pictures to use was a monumental, and agonizing, task. They came from the massive Time Inc. picture collection and from other archives around the world. We figure we inspected some 50,000 photographs; fewer than two percent of them made it into our book. This immersion in the past had a peculiar effect on me. I found myself living those years during the day and dreaming about them at night. My dreams ranged across the century: One night I was a frightened doughboy in France; another, a Dust Bowl farmer hopefully heading west; a third, a laid-back dweller in a Sixties commune. For all of us, the history lessons contained in the pictures were perhaps not surprising but overwhelmingly clear. Ours was an appallingly violent century; the death and destruction were almost beyond human comprehension . Yet again and again we discovered what Wordsworth described as the "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love." And in the midst of worldwide terror, we saw evidence of astonishing ingenuity in science and the arts all around the beleaguered globe. In selecting the pictures, we wanted to use the famous and familiar, yet illuminate them with companion images. Thus, you'll see the flag raising on Iwo Jima and a haunting picture of doomed Marines taken a few minutes later; the brave Chinese youth stopping the tanks in Tiananmen Square and then, incredibly, climbing up on one to plead with the crew; the weeping Navy accordionist playing for the fallen Franklin D. Roosevelt, while a heartbreaking phalanx of the president's fellow polio victims line up in their wheelchairs to say farewell too; a rarely seen sequence of events just before and after a South Vietnamese general shockingly executed a Vietcong suspect on a Saigon street. Finding pictures that were surprising and fresh was a constant wonder. Just to pick a disparate few: the first fatal airplane crash, which also badly injured pilot Orville Wright; the room where the Czar and his family were murdered, its walls pocked with bullet holes; Walt Disney and his staff unselfconsciously wearing, of all Hollywood outfits, knickers, every last man; invading Soviet tanks lined up on a Prague side street like taxicabs, while shoppers casually stroll by. Personally, this book is a kind of retrospective on my life as a journalist. I covered many of the events portrayed herein ;among them, the Southern civil rights struggle, Elvis in his early days, Israeli-Arab combat along the Suez Canal, JFK's death in Dallas, the search for early man in Kenya. ( I still have a handful of two-million-year-old crocodile bones from that assignment. ) I was actually present when some of the pictures were taken ;integration in Little Rock, the H-bomb test high above the Pacific, street rioting in Paris, arming nuclear subs in Scotland. For you, as it has been for me, I hope this book will be a keepsake, a provoker of memories, a guide to how things and people behaved and looked in the 20th Century. Permit me one final observation. It is the remarkable extent to which the United States for the past 100 years has been spared so much of the misery inflicted elsewhere in the world. Our soldiers died, but rarely our civilians. Our cities were never bombed. Since 1865, we have endured internal strife but have not taken up arms against ourselves. We still suffer from the sordid legacy of slavery, but at home we are mostly at peace. God has indeed shed his grace on us, from sea to shining sea. © 1999 by Richard B. Stolley

FROM OUR EDITORS

Nearly 800 spellbinding images document the events and the people most responsible for moving and shaking the 20th century. Classic photos that remain fresh in our mind and remarkable prints that haven't been seen for generations combine to create the ultimate Life pictorial history.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Drawing from magazine and the greatest photo archives of our time, this book chronicles our century by way of an unparalleled collection of photographs. There are more than 770 spellbinding images - chosen from the 50,000 - plus pictures that were reviewed - within these pages. They show significant events and people most responsible for shaping our world and cutlure during the last 100 years. Many are classic photographs from , burned deep into the memory of this nation; others are remarkable prints not seen for generations. Together they create the ultimate Life book - the most fascinating pictorial history of the last 10 decades ever published.

Life: Our Century in Pictures was shaped by Richard B. Stolley. One of LIFE magazine's most distinguished editors. Stolley has spent almost five decades covering and analyzing the major events of our time.

The book spans the century in nine epochs. Each is introduced with an essay by a notable historical commentator. In each is a special section, called Turning Point, that traces an event or trend from the beginning of the century forward. And each epoch closes with a Requiem, which recalls some memorable individuals who died during that time. The worlds of politics, science and technology, and the arts, as well as the lives we led at home and at work - all are explored and brillantly captured within these pages. Life: Our Century in Pictures is history as you've never seen it before - a book to be savored time and again, a book whose images will grow in depth and meaning as we move into the next millennium.

About the Author:

Richard B. Stolley is Senior Editorial Adviser at Time Inc. A native of Pekin, Illinois, and graduate of Northwester University, he began practicing journalism at age 15. After working at three newspapers, he joined the staff of the weekly Life magazine in 1953 and for 19 years covered events and personalities throughout the world. Most memorable among these stories was the death of President John F. Kennedy; Stolley discovered and obtained exclusively for Life the famous Zapruder film of the assassination. In 1974, he was the founding editor of People magazine. After eight years there, he was named editor of the monthly Life and then editorial director of all Time Inc. magazines. He assumed his present position in 1993.

SYNOPSIS

From the magazine that pioneered photojournalism comes the ultimate book: a stirring history captured in over 770 spellbinding images, 200 in color, that defines how the world has been seen over the years.

FROM THE CRITICS

Magazine Editors People