Letters of the Century: America 1900-1999

Letters of the Century opens by recalling a pregnant mother's letter to Jonas Salk the day after he discovered a vaccine for polio. The book's editors, veteran journalists Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler, try to describe that letter's emotional impact: "The difference between knowing that Americans were grateful to Jonas Salk and reading this letter to him is like the difference between knowing the words of a song and hearing it sung. Letters give history a voice."

Organizing them by decade, with helpful annotations for context, this couple has assembled 423 such exceptional letters, culled from a thousand times that many; each gives witness to a sliver of the century, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the patenting of Coca-Cola's glass bottle, from the tension of the Bay of Pigs to the flush of Internet romance. Letters to lovers, threats from gangsters, pleas to judges for mercy, tracts from terrorists, junk mail from evangelists, advice from Ann Landers, even young JFK's message carved on a coconut after PT-109 was sunk--all combine to provide one of the most authentic, resonant, and real histories imaginable, a sweeping and often intensely personal chronicle of the American 20th century, as told by the famous, the infamous, and the obscure. --Paul Hughes