This series of small, thick bricks of books is entirely photographic. You get the flavour of the times without the waffle! ( )

The ten volumes in Hutton Getty Picture Collection series document each of the decades of the 20th century in photographic form. Each book is a squat but thick volume of approximately 400 pages, filled with gray-scale photographs printed at one per page. This volume on the 1970s is organized into 12 chapters that illustrate international events and political activity ("Movers and Shakers," "Conflict", "Terrorism", and "Issues"), as well as entertainment and social life ("Cinema," "The Arts", "Pop", "Fashion", "Youth", "Sport", "Children", and "All Human Life." Each chapter is introduced with a few paragraphs of text printed in English, German, and French, each photo bears a very brief description shown in all three languages.

This volume, like its predecessors, gives a broad overview of the decade. The photographs themselves are of fine quality, and printed at adequate size. On the positive side, one gets a broad impression of a tumultuous decade, filled with international conflict and natural disasters, as well as great social movements that swept the West -- movements seeking social justice, sexual liberation, and youth - based trends in music, art, fashion, and cultural morays. Nevertheless, I found the book somewhat disappointing for two reasons. First, the descriptions of the photographs are so brief that they impart little useful information to readers not familiar with the events mentioned. For example, the caption to page 30's photograph reads "Mobutu Sese Seko, President of Zaire, in a television interview at the height of the civil war in 1977. In front of him are captured Portuguese and Soviet arms, forged American banknotes, and two prisoners from the breakaway region of Katanga (now Shaba)." On page 86 "A woman pleads for help for her wounded husband in the Dekwan district of Beirut. In the early months of the war, the Lebanese government was reluctant to use force to separate the rival factions." Clearly, most readers must turn to other sources for explanations of the events in question.

Second, the photographs are focused on British perspectives of events. Thus, we see depictions of English rock groups and music festivals, youth protests, sporting events, and fashion, with secondary nods to those in the USA. Far less attention is given to the rest of the world, except insofar as conflicts and natural disasters disrupted Western complacency. Most likely this (literally) insular focus reflects those events and people to whom the British photographers had the greatest accessibility. But by the 1970s, photographs were widely available from all over the world. This book could have benefitted by a much broader choice of images.

In sum, this book offers a photographic overview of the 1970s, but falls short of a broad depiction of this tumultuous decade due to its lack of a perspective that is suifficiently international in scope. ( )