Knopf, 279 pp., $26.00
We are now approaching the end of another century, an event that always arouses the liveliest excitement among inhabitants of the Western world, to whom it seems important as a way station in their passage through time, a significant pause convenient for assessing the past and projecting the future, an occasion above all for compiling lists. It was a sign of the fin de siècle mood when time magazine announced in August that it intended in the months ahead to celebrate the one hundred persons of our era who have had the greatest impact on the world and the way we'll live in the future, an exercise that will culminate at the end of 1999 with the naming of the Person of the Century. The editors invited their readers to make nominations and put forward what appeared to be a tentative list of their own: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Lenin, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Elvis, Louis Armstrong, Margaret Sanger, Rosa Parks, Marlon Brando, Einstein, Picasso, Mother Teresa, and Jackie Robinson.
Review, 4873 words
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