Coffee Table Books Are Rife With Millennial Musings

Every yearend is a time for reflection. This year, you get to reflect big-time. The turn of the millennium has inspired a raft of ambitious and beautiful books bringing the soon-to-be-concluded century into sharp focus. In these volumes, you'll find the great era-shaping people, events, and trends, from the growth of New York City to the evolution of pro football.

None of these fin de siecle works is more striking than Century (Phaidon Press, $49.95), conceived and edited by Bruce Bernard, former picture editor of London's Sunday Times and Saturday Independent magazines. A year-by-year pictorial history, it includes more than 1,000 extraordinary photos illustrating major political, cultural, and social themes of the past 100 years. The book is so huge it comes with a special carrying case with a plastic handle, but Century is anything but padded. Its photos range from the glorious (American astronaut Bruce McCandless hopping around in space) to the ironic (Hitler consoling a bedridden officer injured in an attempt on the dictator's life) to the horrific (beheaded corpses during the Boxer Rebellion in China). Short notes putting each photo in proper historical context make this a fascinating read.