Being an inventory of history's most influential photographs, though the editors are careful to differentiate 'influential' from 'good' in their foreword. Some of them are the first this or the first that, including marginalia such as X-Rays, though I suppose that they are photographs of a sort. Influential they may be, but I was familiar with only perhaps half of them, though admittedly I'm no photography hobbyist. The extensive captioning is informative about the provenance of the photographs, though do brace for some historical howlers: Boris Yeltsin was not the head of the USSR, or Russia, or probably much of anything else in 1977. The editors aren't out to spare anybody's feelings; several of the photographs are more than a little hard to take. But overall, it's difficult to argue too much about their selections, and there are more than a few delights herein. ( )