What does the end of the century, the end of the millennium, mean? Do you agree with biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who thinks we don’t share the vivid fear of apocalyptic catastrophe that haunted our ancestors? The worst we can imagine is some half-baked computer failure, or maybe a runaway 747 taking out the Tour Montparnasse. “In the end,” he writes, “there’ll just be one big party, with people all over the planet kissing each other.”
For book publishers, the party started months ago, with the release of countless retrospectives, most ending in “2000,” “Century,” or “Millennium.” Here are a few. Not all were published specially, but the exceptions seem to have something important to say about the subject anyway.

This humongous, marvelous book weighs six kilos and comes in a case with a handle. Even the subtitle, “One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope,” is a mouthful. It is the best of many attempts to tell the history of the century in photographs.
There are 1,060 photos, about ten a year, their power enhanced by the large format and simple layout. Some are unbearably brutal: one image of a lynching, the men smiling for the camera while their victim’s body burns, is the sickest I have ever seen. But overall Bernard, an ex-Sunday Times picture editor, has avoided easy nostalgia or feel-good snaps and succeeded in his aim of getting us to “meet some real people.” Available in French, as “Siècle” (Phaidon, 299F).
Also good, if more predictable, is “Life: Our Century in Pictures” (Bulfinch), with 770 of the magazine’s 50,000 photos.

Now five years old, and a best-seller in its new French edition (“L’Age des Extrêmes,” Complexe), this is a pithy history of this century by an expert on the one before. Hobsbawm cleverly restricts himself to the “short century,” from 1914 to the fall of the wall in 1989, and views the world wars as a single conflict, the first resolving nothing, the second everything.
Even more international and wide-ranging is “Millennium,” by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, also zeroing in on the last 1,000 years.

Already a huge seller in France (“La Terre Vue du Ciel,” La Martinière, 295F), this UNESCO-sponsored book is a bold attempt to fix the state of the planet at the century’s close. It contains 195 astonishing aerial pictures taken over 75 countries. Arthus-Bertrand has an amazing eye, producing sumptuous and mysterious images of every kind of landscape, from icebergs, islands, dunes and deltas to an Iraqi tank graveyard, a Rio shantytown, and a Moroccan dye market. The colors and patterns are breathtaking; how very strange and beautiful the planet seems.

Four big thinkers — a semiologist, a biologist, a novelist, and an historian — tackle the impending apocalypse, if any. The ideas come thick and fast, with even Eco talking coherently. He reminds us that scary number 2000 should make us stop and think about where we are going, something most of us don’t do enough.

Two gigantesque volumes, almost 1,500 images from the Whitney Museum’s much-talked-about exhibitions on American art. The first volume is more of a social chronicle, with some awesome images of Manhattan; the second explodes with abstract expressionism and the in-your-face glories of pop. There is a little film and music, but not much: hard to believe that Yoko Ono’s vagina paintings merit more space than Spielberg’s films.

With respect to Spielberg and Yoko Ono, for my money the artform of the century is rock ’n’ roll. So it is fitting that the long-awaited second edition of the best book on the subject should appear just before the curtain falls. Written by hundreds of fans via the Net, this is a phenomenal compendium of fact and opinion, covering 1,400 acts, 10,000 albums and 500 pictures, all in an affordable paperback. The Guardian called it a “sexy, all-conquering guide, with big, brash entries colorfully written by opinionated maniacs,” and I can’t put it better.
It’s wonderful to read a book that gets so excited about something as essentially mindless as pop music, from its “adolescence as a bona fide youth movement to its present middle age of bloated corporate product.” The writing is incessantly inspired: of the Stones, for instance, we learn that they invented “rock’s most enduring formula — snotty white boys messing around with the blues,” while the Sex Pistols were more like Frankenstein’s monster, “escaping their creator and raising havoc before being hounded to destruction by villagers with flaming torches.”
Interesting to note that only four of the 1,400 bands are French. This is one up on the first edition: the newcomers are Air, purveyors of “retrograde pop fluff with a suntan.” Don’t agree? Get on-line and give ’em hell at www.roughguides.com/rock.

My favorite of the half a dozen new guides on bubbly, this slim volume gives us anecdotes, theory, and just enough on vintners, including some good gossip.
Useful for its listings, Tom Stevenson’s “Champagne 2000” (DK) refers to a famous champagne quote, attributed to Lily Bollinger (1899-1977), of the prestigious “Bolly” dynasty: “I drink it when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory... Otherwise I never touch it — unless I’m thirsty, of course.”
Also fine for historical background, in French, “Champagne” by Eric Glatre (Minerva).

Erratum: In last month’s issues we got the publisher of the “Paris Mon Amour” wrong. Apologies to Taschen, the real editor.