This book isn't what I thought it was. Perhaps unjustifiably, but understandably (I hope), I expected a collection of photographs that would illuminate and vivify the the nineteen-oughts the way that Lesy's Long Time Coming illuminated the period between 1935 and 1943, showing the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things. But instead of presenting a slice of life, Lesy here has preferred images that he feels illuminate the present: disaster, warfare, extremes of poverty and wealth. There are also many original captions and educational texts that are included because of their shocking racism. And they really do shock, even for well-read, jaded history buffs such as me.

The photographs were originally stereographs: fully three-dimensional images intended to be viewed with a special device. This was big business for a while, and it's worthwhile to reflect how much power these images must have had to people who, in contrast to we moderns, were not exposed to thousands of images every day on screens, but only the few presented to them on commercial signs, in newspapers and magazines, in uncommonly encountered illustrated books, and perhaps at movie theaters a few times a month. A 3-D image must have often produced gasps, even when they did not show decaying bodies with missing limbs or the neck stumps of beheaded prisoners, as some of these do.

To my history-nerd sensibilities, the book's greatest strength lies in the text, not the images. At the beginning, and especially between chapters, Lesy explains the origin of the stereograph and how for a few decades it was the biggest media sensation of its era. It's a forgotten history magnificently explained, mixed together with Lesy's own meditations on history and progress and the contrast between the past and the present moment. Lesy is as excellent a writer as he is an archivist, and although the project would be uncommercial, I wish he'd written a book about the stereograph instead of this shock-and-awe image collection. ( )