Icons: An A-Z Guide to the People Who Shaped Our Time

One of my favorite browsing books, Icons: An A-Z Guide to the People Who Shaped Our Time, has a thousand short (200-300 word) biographies about influential people from post WWII to the present (or up to 1991, the year of the book's publication).

It's fascinating to flip through, especially when I come across a name I'm famliar with but know nothing about, such as Edward Albee, Pol Pot, George Meany, Germaine Greer, Bruce Chatwin, or Luis Bunuel. Every entry has some kind o surprising information (I never knew that Che Guevara was director of the Cuban National Bank, "where he ruthlessly imposed a Soviet-style economy -- treating it as a single unit rather than the

It's even interesting to read about people I've never even heard of. The book is out of print, but copies are going for as little as 75 cents on Amazon. Link