People of the Century: One Hundred Men And Women Who Shaped The Last One Hundred Years

Profiles one hundred of the most influential political leaders, artists, scientists, intellects, tycoons, and heroes of the twentieth century

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 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.