The Century
   Peter Jennings & Todd Brewster
  1998 Doubleday New York USA
   ISBN: 0385483279


As a companion to the landmark ABC News & The History Channel television series this book meanders through the eras, the decades, the war phobias & peacetime fads. From farms to cities to riots; from poverty to wealth & back again; from the disenfranchised to the politicians to the Supreme Court; from horsedrawn carriages to mass transit to space shuttles.

Weighing in at 5lbs+, this is one heavy tome filled with engrossing details, photos, sidebars, statistics, & first-hand accounts by people who felt the exhilarating & dangerous moments as this century swirled around them - America's urban nightmare; Marching with the Suffragettes; A Black soldier goes to war for Wilson; Life on the Bum; Survival and surrender on Okinawa; Shanghai, 1949; A Russian learns about Sputnik; Martial Law in Poland; Making Babies in the Nineties.

This is a keeper for sure, it will take me a year just to absorb each & every page. The Century is like a chocolate torte - thick, rich & filled with crunch & flavor. From a sepia print of our great-grandmothers in their wide belts, shirtwaisters, hats & flags to Disneyland's Fantasyland Dumbo ride in a 1950s color photo to the bullet-marked, bombed-shell of a building in Yugoslavia, with the blurr of a girl leaping across where once had stood a 400 year old bridge.

Peter Jennings is, of course, a national newscaster with an abundant, fluent grasp of affairs. Together with Todd Brewster as Senior Editorial Producer & Katherine Bourbeau as Photographic Editor, he has brought forth a superb, if westernized, overview of the past 100 years.

Each section such as Seeds of Change or Boom to Bust or Global Nightmare or Mass Markets or Machine Dreams are extended & far-ranging narratives interspersed by photos of notable people & events - the first airplane aloft in front of the White House; Teddy Roosevelt orating before a huge Old Glory; Harlem residents dancing at a block party in 1915; The Sultan of Swat being mobbed; the 1938 Hurricane flooding streets in Rhode Island; the 1939 World's Fair; the horror photos from all theaters of the Second World War & Hiroshima after the Bomb; a department store cosmetics counter in the 1950s; an exercise class in front of a television; that burning bus in Alabama after the Freedom Riders had been beaten; the march on the Supreme Court after its 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade; the misted stacks of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant & so forth.

Added to each section are first-hand accounts & pictures of ordinary people made extraordinary by who they knew or where they were when it happened. These are like leaves & pebbles in an already engaging, multitudinous stream of links that unfold, elucidate & connect the thousands of happenings that have made up this noisy, boisterous & inventive century.

I like this type of history where the everyday & the unique, the arts & the crimes; the great construction wonders & the Sit-Ins; the movements that ratched-up our consciousness & the riots that exposed our perceived injustices; the wars & the machinery; the science & the religions all rub shoulders between the same covers. Only newspeople, skilled & versed in the array of daily life, could have brought together & created this vivid, intelligent & sometimes, humorous, saga.

Each decade is described by the lifestyles, sobriquets & fashions; by the economics, laws & politics. In each decade too, people remember. Remember going to Chicago from the South; the Monkey Trial & the crisis of evolution; FDR & the Great Depression; Hitler & The Eastern Front; the return of Peace & the new experience of suburbia; the Civil Rights movement in music; a construction worker & an anti-Vietnam War march; the anti-tax revolt & life in liberal California; The Challenger & living with AIDS; the Gulf War & so, so much more.

Peter Jennings' book The Century is an exuberance of the plenty, of the obvious & the unusual. Very well done indeed to the entire team for hours of interest & details. A must for every family curious about how we got here & what interesting times our grandparents, parents & we have lived through.

I cannot encourage you enough to read, enjoy & remember The Century.
(07/04/99)

Rebecca