History is not only about royalty and politicians. Few written histories adequately address the true human response to the tumultuous events they describe. In Portrait of a Century, Betty Boyden looks back over the twentieth century and reveals how major national and international events affected several generations of her own family. The book shows how her world was altered by global conflict, uneasy peace, and the wide-ranging social changes that accompanied the end of the Second World War. Viewing such a turbulent century through the eyes of one family allows us to see not a bygone world at a safe remove, but an ever-changing one that is always in the process of becoming something else.