By Pam Robinson

   From Thucydides’ account of the plague in Athens in 430 B.C. up to the fall of President Marcos in 1986, Eyewitness to History provides stark, first-hand accounts of historical events.

    Edited by John Carey, the book is a collection of writings from people on the scene as events unfolded, a priceless reporting of events unfiltered by editors or with the benefit of hindsight or much context.

     That is not to say that there’s much objectivity here—on the contrary, many of the authors have a personal or cultural stake in the outcome, though these accounts  rarely come  from the major players in the events.  That said, the descriptions of life as the events unfolded are unparalleled in value.

      Events covered, are, frequently, wars or momentous events, such as Walt Whitman’s account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the burning of Rome, numerous bloody battles between the British and name-the-colony,  World War II battles and so on.

   But many others just report on life and death as they happened: a Viking funeral, the Irish potato famine,  Paul Gauguin’s wedding in Tahiti (as told by Gauguin), the sale of slaves, the opening if a railway, a 19th-Century mastectomy, the forced-feeding of an  imprisoned suffragette, and so on.  Many of the 300 pieces are quite short--a page or so--and easy to read. A prior knowledge of the events is not necessary to understand and appreciate the writing.

 While many of the authors are well known, others are  not; all of are equal value and together provide an unsurpassed look at historical events.

  This book was originally published in Britain as the Faber Book of Reportage.  Carey, an Oxford English professor,  has edited numerous books, including "Eyewitness to Science."

 Pam Robinson is based at Newsday as a news editor with the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service,  and is co-founder of the American Copy Editors Society.