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The Future Remembered is a big, beautiful photo book about the Seattle World's Fair, which will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2012. About a third of the book is devoted to the process of planning and setting up the fair (there was a lot of resistance to it from the general public), more than a third of it is a chronological recounting, month by month, of the happenings at the fair, and then it concludes with a chapter on the fair's legacy.

Future recounts in breathless, magazine-y prose all of the World's Fair's highlights, including famous visitors, (a parade of celebrities peaking, of course, with Elvis, and just about every politician in America at the time with the curious exception of President Kennedy, who only managed a quick drive-through before the fair even opened) attractions, (Belgian waffles became absurdly popular) and over ten million guests from around the globe. Longtime residents of Seattle should find it a wistful treat, and devoted Seattle transplants will enjoy the look at the Seattle that was. For what it is—an exploration of a time when the past became nostalgic for the future—it's just about perfect. (My only major nitpick: I could have used a few more maps of the grounds at the time, because I still don't have any real idea of how the fair was laid out in the space that we now know as Seattle Center.)

The end of Future is a crashing anticlimax. But that's not the book's fault—it's reality's fault. The Seattle Center today is an anticlimax, a hunk of the Fair's potential, wasted and left for tourist bait. In fact, the book leaves Seattlite readers with kind of an acrid taste in their mouths: It's a sad reminder of a time when a young, confident Seattle could create a world-class attraction in a few short years. Their vision of the future makes our present look tiny in comparison.