LIFE: Our Century in Pictures for Young People Review

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LIFE: Our Century in Pictures for Young People ReviewKnowing that the photographs would be evocative and interesting, I purchased this book for my nephew. But after reading the captions which accompany many of the photos, I have reconsidered my decision. To start with, the language used in the captions is hardly appropriate for the young reader. No effort seems to have been made by the editors to contextualize, politically or historically, the images selected. Often there is a loose "thematic" arrangement which sets images in opposition without a clear statement of the connections, chronological or otherwise, between them. The captions read as if the editors haphazardly, and hurriedly, chopped up the narrative from the "adult" version of the text to create a text thoughtlessly marketed to younger readers. Worse still is the glaring editorial bias, bordering on jingoism, with which the text treats the Cold War and the former Soviet Union. While I hardly expected the editors at Life magazine to present a balanced narrative about the clash of ideas that defined so much of the last century, I was shocked to see the Soviets repeatedly referred to as "Reds", a term that very few of the children born after the collapse of the Soviet Union would even understand, and in a page dedicated to the McCarthy hearings, Communism was referenced as a "disease" (news to more than one medical professional I am sure) and the young reader is reminded that McCarthy was attacking a very real "communist threat" but lamentably had gone too far.
It is understandable that in a Post-Communist world we can see the projects of the Soviet Union and its allies as failures, and there is no harm in naming them as such, but the anachronistic and, frankly, stupid "slang" used by the writers reflects the degree to which they were NOT creating an educational text, but rather an out-dated propagandistic tract. I would not recommend this book to anyone who wants to foment thoughtful analysis in the minds of the young people they know. A total dud!LIFE: Our Century in Pictures for Young People Overview

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