Times to Remember

By Jesse Birnbaum

Inevitably, much of the heavy baggage that readers will schlep across the bridge into the 21st century will be the large-format, illustrated histories of the 20th. The bridge is not yet ready for traffic, but two such volumes are now crowding the toll gates. One is The Century (Doubleday; 606 pages; $60) by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster; the other, The American Century (Knopf; 710 pages; $50) by Harold Evans. The books are distinctly different, but each has much to recommend it, not least because Jennings, a Canadian national, and British-born Evans, now a U.S. citizen, view their subject from the perspective of resident Tocquevilles. Their books will sit well on the coffee table when they are not being devoured.

Jennings, the ABC television anchor, and Brewster, a producer of ABC's 27-hour Century TV series, which will air next year, call their book "a selective look," to be read "like a novel." For the most part, it is a richly satisfying chronicle.

Enlivened by a fine selection of black-and-white and color photos, The Century is a journalists' even-handed and vivid narrative of epochal global events and decisive mood changes in the nation's character. On the '70s: " ...the need to feel 'guilt free' in one's private life, to act without a sense of limits, became, for many, paramount. Thus...fewer trips to the confessional (though decidedly more visits to psychotherapists), freer attitudes toward sex, and a new vocabulary entry that described just about anyone with a private conscience as possessed of 'hang-ups.'"

Throughout the narrative, the authors provide fascinating reminiscences by eyewitnesses: a woman recalls a Wright brothers test flight in 1904; a man remembers the 1920s heyday of the Harlem Renaissance; a magazine writer covers the launch--and explosion--of the shuttle Challenger in 1986.

Evans, a longtime journalist and, until recently, president and publisher of Random House, is now editorial director of the New York Daily News, U.S. News & World Report and Atlantic Monthly. His American Century is told in black-and-white photographs, sprightly essays and lengthy commentaries flavored with personal observations.

American Century begins with the U.S. centennial in 1889 and ends roughly 100 years later, so it is not, strictly speaking, a review of the 20th century but a "selective newsreel." Here, Evans says, is the story of how the American people "sustained Western civilization by acts of courage, generosity and vision unparalleled in the history of man."

His characterizations of national figures are sharp and entertaining. William McKinley "was a hometown saint who never stole a cent." Al Capone "walked into a bar and emptied a six-shooter into the head of a gangster called Joe Howard. Three men saw him do it, but between the murder and the inquest two were overcome by amnesia and one went missing." Senator Joe McCarthy "was a bully and a liar who belched in the face of the Bill of Rights."

Engaging as it is, Evans' brisk newsreel is disappointingly too selective. His only reference to the Wright brothers, for example, is made not in the context of the birth of the age of flight but in a photo caption showing Teddy Roosevelt sitting in a pusher plane in 1910. Elvis Presley, who wrought a different kind of revolution, is not mentioned at all.

The reader may wish, moreover, that Evans had stretched his "century" farther. As it is, he is obliged by his theme to ignore spectacular events of the '90s. Those curious about more recent happenings have to turn to Jennings and Brewster to find the Rodney King episode, which triggered nationwide race riots; the astonishing Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings and O.J. Simpson trial; the attack on David Koresh's cult in Waco, Texas; and the crimes, capture and trials of Timothy McVeigh and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

For that matter, both books touch only obliquely on the most stunning national event of the past 25 years: the constitutional crisis involving the last President of this century. Jennings and Brewster merely observe that "thanks to the stretch of the techno-environment, it was virtually impossible not to be aware almost instantaneously of every new gory detail about O.J., Diana, even Monica Lewinsky," adding no information about who Lewinsky might be. A picture caption describing the Clarence Thomas hearings says, without elaboration, that "seven years later...President Bill Clinton was accused of far worse behavior than Thomas."

The six years of the Clinton Administration--good and bad--get only cursory treatment in both volumes. It is as if, in their haste to beat the centennial clock by a few years, the editors decided to abridge vital history, but this is abridge too far.