An excellent pictorial overview of life in the 1860's and 1870's. I purchased this book 25 years ago and it is still one of my favorites. The author takes you to the all parts of the world and examines both major and minor deatails which make life in that era so interesting.

I first read this book back in 1977, and have read it a couple of times since. It is an excellent book. It covers disasters from the Chicago Fire of 1871 to the Italian earthquakes of 1976, revealing facts about the disaster and describing how the newspapers of the day covered the stories. The author is very good at showing how opinions of these catastrophes changed and modified as new information became available, and what the newspapers of the day wrote, both immediately following disaster and in the months afterwards. Jones book covers both well known tragedies, such as the Titanic and San Francisco earthquakes, and lesser known ones such as the burning of the ship 'General Slocum', and the Australian Bush fires of 1939. Each entry is well illustrated with photographs and Newspaper drawings from the period. One drawback of the book is that Jones seems to become rather tired by the end, and so his entries for the decades of the sixties and seventies are extremely short, sometimes only a paragraph. The reader needs more. But this is a small flaw in an otherwise fine book.