Selected Essays
by John Berger
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John Berger's diverse achievements as a writer are widely recognized. In addition to plays, novels, short stories, and poetry, he has always written essays, expressing more than forty years of tireless intellectual inquiry and fierce political engagement. Polemical, meditative, radical, and always original ("The moment at which a piece of music begins to provide a clue to the nature of all art"), Berger's essays are also extremely wide-ranging. Photographers, artists, thinkers, peasants, show more zoos, museums, and cities he has visited are among his subjects -sometimes all within the space of a single essay. On the occasion of Berger's seventy-fifth birthday, this collection acknowledges and honors the rich variety of his ideas and concerns. It does not simply show how Berger's views have changed or how his thought has evolved; it can also be seen as a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time, as seen through the prism of art. Geoff Dyer has selected essays that originally appeared in Permanent Red, The Moment of Cubism, The Look of Things, About Looking, The Sense of Sight, and Keeping a Rendezvous. Apparent throughout these essays are the central concerns that have informed all of Berger's writing: the enduring mystery of great art and the experience of the oppressed. Most important, Selected Essays addresses the question asked by readers new to Berger's remarkable body of work: "Which book should I read first?" Selected Essays is an excellent answer to that question. show lessTags
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I liked this book enough that I do recommend the reading of it by others, especially those interested and obsessed with painting and painters. Seems that is what Berger is most interested in. But I would have liked the selection better had the essays been more personal. I explain why in my more extensive review found here:
http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/Geoff-Dyer-Selects-the-Best-Essays-of-John-Ber...
http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/Geoff-Dyer-Selects-the-Best-Essays-of-John-Ber...
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149+ Works 17,085 Members
John Peter Berger was born in London, England on November 5, 1926. After serving in the British Army from 1944 to 1946, he enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art. He began his career as a painter and exhibited work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. He then worked as an art critic for The New Statesman for a decade. He wrote fiction show more and nonfiction including several volumes of art criticism. His novels include A Painter of Our Time, From A to X, and G., which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. His other works include an essay collection entitled Permanent Red, Into Their Labors, and a book and television series entitled Ways of Seeing. In the 1970s, he collaborated with the director Alain Tanner on three films. He wrote or co-wrote La Salamandre, The Middle of the World, and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. He died on January 1, 2017 at the age of 90. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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