Michael Lesy

Got this one through inter-library loan and was very, very sorry to have to let it go today.

I (morbidly) loved everything about it except for Lesy's opening and closing essays, which are sometimes poetic, but more often cringe-inducing. Fortunately, they are also short, and the end result of this compilation of photographs and newspaper clippings from late 1800s Wisconsin newspapers is fantastically weird and totally absorbing.

Like many reviewers, I read this because it was mentioned in show more the notes in Goolrick's A Reliable Wife, a book I did not actually enjoy, but nonetheless could not stop reading. "Such things happened?" Apparently so... diphtheria, arson, murder, and madness abound in WDT. The suicides are what really got me, though.

"Mrs. Phillip Fredericks, aged 82 years, who was partly insane, threw herself in her neighbor's cistern at Beloit and was drowned. She had long planned death in this manner."

"Henry Johnson, an old bachelor of Grand Dyke, cut off the heads of all of his hens recently, made a bonfire of his best clothes, and killed himself with arsenic."

"The 80 year old mother of an imprisoned man threw herself in front of a train and was cut into 3 pieces. She was crazed by the disgrace."

"James Price, aged about 60 years, committed suicide at Omro by taking paris green and morphine. All attempts to save him he resisted. Despondency was the cause of the act. He fell last spring and broke the patella of his right knee and has been unable to work since. He leaves a wife and one daughter."

"Working men at Kenosha found the body of a man hanging from a rafter. The body was badly decomposed. Nothing was found to identify it."

"Gottlied Wagner, an old farmer living near Montello, set fire to all his farm buildings and then threw himself into the flames. All his grain and farm implements were destroyed... The cause of the act was supposed to have been a divorce procured by his wife. He destroyed the property to prevent it falling into her hands. Wagner kissed the children goodbye, gave each some money, and sent them to school. His wife left him a week before.

"Ludwig Senglaub, a German resident of Manitowoc, aged 74, committed suicide Friday morning at the home of William Radins. The old man had become enamored of Mrs. Radins and had been a frequent visitor at the house. She told him not to come any more. He went to the house, however, walked into the front room, and deliberately shot himself while looking into a mirror."

"Mary Karban, wife of Wenzel Karban, a farmer of the town of Neva, committed suicide by eating the heads of 4 boxes of matches. She was only 16 years of age and had been married last fall."

Mrs. Reuben C. Bartlett, an elderly woman living near the western limits of Eau Claire, partly filled a washtub with kerosene, partially disrobed, and poured kerosene over her head and set fire to it. She died in a horrible agony before help reached her. She was undoubtedly insane... She leaves several adult sons and daughters and a husband."

"Abraham Zweekbaum of the town of Holland committed suicide by battering himself on the head with a hammer... He attempted to take his life a few days ago by cutting his head from his body with a sharp instrument, but was prevented from doing so."

And this:

"Elsie Whitsan, 4 years old, child of Henry Whitsan, died at Neenah of grief... Her mother died a few days before and from then until her death the child cried without stopping. Physicians say that death was caused by a broken heart."

Wow.

Also watched the film adaptation last night, and it is a beautiful, delicate treatment of the subject -- highly recommended. show less

A wonderful collection of documentary photographs from the Farm Security Administration, the same agency that sponsored the work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. These photographs are so much more vivid than any attempts at fine art could be, while often achieving that status themselves. The past is made real here: not just farms, migrants, and poverty, but the ordinary life of people in cities or at leisure, including old people, adults in their prime, teenagers, and children. There's a show more feeling of spontaneity to many of these scenes that's quite remarkable for an age seventy years before the camera phone, when film was expensive and difficult to develop, and the cameras themselves were difficult to carry and set up. My mother was born in 1931, and this helped me understand the world into which she was born.

Lesy's text is unobtrusive, being fitted into its own sections between long stretches of photographs, and greatly illuminates the circumstances that led to the creation of these photos, and how after years of neglect they finally found their way into an archive. Highly recommended for lovers of 20th century American history and of street photography. show less

That this book ever wound up on a TBR list is an artifact of a time when food TV was an enthusiasm of mine, and anything involving Tony Bourdain was not to be missed. Having finally gotten to this book, I was initially not that impressed, as with a grab bag of chapters dealing with such topics as the period crusade for food purity, how working men and working women went about procuring food in public, and the plight of restaurant workers, the overall impact was that the parts were not show more aggregating into something greater.

Then, embedded in a chapter dealing with how dining out became an adventure for Americans, there is an account of Teddy Roosevelt publicly celebrating the American ideal in the company of a group of Hungarian Jews on February 14, 1905. The event itself was rather poignant, but at this point Lesy & Stoffer's real concern snaps into focus, as they are covering the beginning of an epoch of American eating that we are still in the throes of, and I finally found myself impressed.

That said, I'm still happy that I read "Three Squares" by Abigail Carroll and "Ten Restaurants that Changed America" by Paul Freedman before I got to this book. show less

There is something about New York City from the mid-20th century that is always so amazing to me. Even by the 1960s, Metropolis still had a flair, a hive of humanity to so many. Angel Rizzuto was one of those denizens, an angry man (he felt his brothers had betrayed him) who snapped photographs of buildings and their inhabitants every day. He left a trove of snapshots to the Library of Congress, which did jack-squat with them until Michael Lesy came along.

Lesy's intoduction to the photos is show more quite marvelous, delving into Angel's life and trying to understand why he did what he did. The scenes of city life with the women (all who seem to have believed in heavily made-up eyebrows and faces...rather like today) walking angrily along and children still absorbed in childhood...it all takes us back to the days when social media meant standing on a corner and actually talking with others. Gotham style, of course.

These aren't photographs of a master but of a nameless layman, who left us a view of Manhattan that is now frozen in time. Makes for an excellent coffee-table companion.

Book Season = Autumn (that's NYC's best look) show less