Life Magazine. Life: The First Fifty Year, 1936-1986

Little Brown & Co, 1987. — 326 p.This overview of the past fifty years reflected in the pages of "Life" magazine ranges in tone from the sublime to the frivolous in a pictorial re-creation of recent history.Wainwright spent most of his adult life working for LIFE , and his history of the enormously influential and popular magazine reflects both his devotion to and knowledge of it. Many who write publication histories are good at why the product ultimately failed, but find it harder to put together the elements of its success. Wainwright does admirably here, not only telling knowledgeable and interesting tales about the founding and founders (and many subsequent important events and people), but also capturing what it was that made LIFE special then and so unlike today's species of carefully calculated, bloodless marketing vehicles. His book is a splendid and fitting accompaniment to the magazine's 50th anniversary. BOMC alternate. Less satisfying is the anthology titled LIFE, the First 50 Years...Although it is heavily illustrated with facsimiles as well as photos, the book lacks the flavor of leafing through 50 years of actual LIFE magazines. However, if one accepts the limitations of compression, it does a solid job of providing some sense of what was going on each year in the world and the magazine. The format is simple. Each year features a few highlighted "classic photos" (some too small to have much impact), miniature reproductions of each weekly issue's cover, excerpts from a few stories and photo essays (some of these pictures stunningly reproduced), and a list of key events, movies, fads, and whatnot of the respective year. Fewer self-congratulatory historical tidbits and more samples of the magazine's best work would have improved this book, but it is still an interesting and valuable cultural document.