Century

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In 1999, Century, Bruce Barnard's pictorial history of the 20th century, won critics' plaudits and readers' favor. One reviewer called it "a stupendous photographic chronicle of a tumultuous century" and the Evening Standard adjudged it "the photographic book of the year." Barnard has now transformed this "heavyweight champ of photo books" into a 1,200-page mini format book that one can hold in the palm of one hand. This edition contains 1,090 photographs in color and duotone and has been extended to include events up to and including September 11, 2001.

Library Journal

Starting like a salute to art photography (Atget, Lartigue, Kertesz) and ending like a gruesome history of photojournalism (with the full-color disasters in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Columbine), this enormous collection of 20th-century pictures has no triumphalist or revisionist point to make. In fact, British picture editor Bernard brings nothing but his rather random eye to this loose, arty representation of our inspiring and brutal century. The book's shallow captions range from the credulous ("Mistrustful Alabama patrolmen watching African-Americans intent on racial integration") to the ridiculous ("US Marines waiting to embark for Korea. The image could move us to wish them—and their enemies—well." What?). But the book does average an impressive ten photos per annum, many of them spectacular, grisly, or moving. The year 1934 matches the historical pairs of Riefenstahl and Hitler and Bonnie and Clyde. More sensationally, a murdered young Brazilian transvestite appears opposite a bare-breasted Italian porn star for 1987, and Nixon and Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention are paired with a picture of a Korean guerrilla's severed head. Why? Because they are all—ynching victims, shelled children, or movie stars—merely contextless images with which Bernard plays visual games. Over the long haul, this handsome, scattered book's equality of violent and arty images reduces both to a numbing sameness. Recommended for larger libraries with the shelf space and the budget.
—Nathan Ward, Library Journal Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Lisa Schwarzbaum

(It) may be all you need to know all you need to know everthing you need to know...a grand and grandiose collection of more than 1,000 photographs documenting a hundred years of world history as seen throught the eyes of photojournalists...Century is a stirring way to see the 20th century out and welcome in the 21st.
—Entertainment Weekly

Magazine Editors People

From Pavlov's famous dogs to the anguished face of a Columbine High survivor, this enormous, austerely beautiful volume lets its pictures tell the story—and they're up to the task.

Kirkus Reviews

With a photo in nearly every one of this volume's 1,000 pages, this must undoubtedly be the most comprehensive visual account yet of the past century. It is hard not to get lost wandering through this massive volume, with images by the well-known (Atget, Brassai, Lartigue) as well as the anonymous. Subjects as well range from the famous to the mundane. On the verge of the century, in 1899, we see Lillian Langtry, former mistress of the Prince of Wales, reclining languorously, and we see New Women "approaching the coming century with high spirits." We see children roller skating in Berlin in 1912, and in the same year, Greek Boy Scouts having to learn rescue techniqiues during the Balkan Wars. We see Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial, in 1925, and we see Albert Einstein conversing with New York reporters in 1934. The book's final image is rather artificially upbeat at the end of a bloody century, but it does nothing to mitigate the narrative and emotional power of the thousand images that precede it in this prodigious work by photo editor Bernard.