LIFE: OUR CENTURY IN PICTURES

Arranging the history of the last 100 years around images rather than text is a daunting task indeed. How does one choose one photograph over another without reducing a vital event to a captioned historical blip? But it works; these images of the century's watershed political, cultural, and social moments speak for themselves. Although it contains the occasional odd juxtaposition -- a gruesome pic of dead El Salvadoran leftists appears next to a gruesome still from Michael Jackson's Thriller video -- LIFE remains a moving, impressively comprehensive tribute to the 20th century. B+