Icons: An A-Z Guide to the People Who Shaped Our Time (1992)

Hip and opinionated, this book gives thumbnail sketches of the thousand or so people who supposedly shaped the late 20th century. Listing them alphabetically, Icons: An A-Z Guide to the People Who Shaped Our Time embraces presidents, rock stars, scientists, poets, and revolutionaries — many of them still living. The mix is impressive: Not every Who's Who would follow Marilyn Monroe with Monty Python's Flying Circus. Compiled by a British author and research team, Icons has a few factual errors and too much smug Oxbridge political correctness, but the book's strength is the way it illuminates — with brief explanations — the work of such otherwise- daunting figures as psychologist B.F. Skinner and philosopher Michel Foucault. And Icons isn't afraid to trash phonies (Jeff Koons and Malcom Forbes, among others). B