Life 50, 1936-1986: The First Fifty Years

Real Life died on December 29, 1972 but a rather artificial Life was born in October, 1978 as a monthly and struggled on for a few years until May, 2000 but Time still wanted to create Life and something was produced in the test tube of publishing in 2007: an extremely thin weekly inserted into local city papers. Unfortunately there just wasn't enough ad revenue to sustain Life and that was that though over the years, since 1972, there have been many special editions to celebrate a momentous event or personality. Those who remember the weekly, and in its best years it was selling millions each week, will enjoy this 320 page coffee table book. The five decades are further divided into years with each getting memorable photos and reproductions of spreads from the magazine with all the covers printed as thumbnails and dated. Sidebars for each year detail the main events in the US and the world; firsts; movies; songs; stage; books and fads. Slightly annoying, I thought, was the lack of issue dates on the photo captions or the reproduced spreads. At the end of each decade there is a photo essay of memorable images with two or three large over a spread. A nice touch, over seven pages, are all the spreads from the first ninety-eight page issue in 1936. I thought this was a fascinating book and rather better than many others published by the magazine and (rather amazingly) it can be picked up quite cheaply on many net sites. ***LOOK AT SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.