The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America - Hardcover

Buk-Swienty, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393060233 ISBN 13: 9780393060232

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

Synopsis

Social reformer Jacob Riis made it impossible for Americans to look the other way; now this inspiring biography restores his greatness.

Drawing on previously unexamined diaries and letters, The Other Half marvelously re-creates the moving story of Jacob Riis, the legendary Progressive reformer and muckraking photographer. Born in 1849 in rural Denmark, Riis immigrated to America in 1870 following a devastating romantic breakup. Penniless and starving, Riis stumbled into journalism, eventually becoming a charismatic police reporter for the New York Tribune, where he befriended Theodore Roosevelt and witnessed firsthand the appalling tenement conditions of late nineteenth-century New York. His resulting exposé, How the Other Half Lives, was the first major American muckraking book. It brought Americans in touch with their lost humanity, establishing a precedent for Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jane Addams, and Upton Sinclair. Described by Roosevelt as "the ideal American," Riis died in 1914, mourned by millions, a celebrated hero. Tom Buk-Swienty's long-awaited biography, a superb evocation of the muckraking era, is a compelling work, designed with 55 haunting images from Riis's own photographic oeuvre. 55 photographs

About this title

About the Authors

Tom Buk-Swienty, a Danish historian, has been the U.S. correspondent for several major Danish newspapers. A former Fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, he now teaches at the University of Southern Denmark.

Annette Buk-Swienty lives in southern Denmark with her husband, historian Tom Buk-Swienty, and their two children.

Reviews

Beyond his famous photographs of slums, Jacob Riis (1849–1914) may be a cipher to students of American social reform. They aren’t responsible: no Riis biography has been published for decades, and never one as thorough as this. Written by a Danish journalist, the biography capitalizes on Riis’ extensive writings as well as on the background of the book that made Riis famous, How the Other Half Lives (1890). Before the publication of that book, however, Riis’ life was a descent from a middle-class household to hand-to-mouth vagrancy, lacerated by unrequited love from which he fled by immigrating to America. From Riis’ nadir of a contemplated suicide, Buk-Swienty chronicles Riis’ perseverance and luck, which placed him on a journalistic road to success as well as a fairy tale–like return to his one true love, Elisabeth Giørtz. Following the now-established Riis on his prowls around New York City as a police reporter, Buk-Swienty imparts the squalor of streets and tenements that Riis eventually exposed in his photographs. Many of the latter illustrate this much-needed portrait. --Gilbert Taylor

Jacob Riis, an ambitious carpenter from a rural town in Denmark who became famous for his photojournalistic expos� of the squalor of Manhattan�s tenements, abandoned his homeland after being spurned by a local beauty, and spent several years as a tramp and itinerant worker in Buffalo and western Pennsylvania. This biography vividly captures that time, during which Riis was constantly on the verge of exhaustion and destitution. His experience of poverty shaped his later attempts to humanize it, in the stark images and text of his seminal book �How the Other Half Lives.� Buk-Swienty esteems his subject without idolizing him, noting that Riis sought to improve the living conditions of the poor in part to stave off anarchy and a Communist revolution.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:0316057584 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: The seventeenth and final novel in Rankin�s Inspector Rebus series is set during the Edinburgh detective�s final week at work. (He is nearing the mandatory retirement age of sixty.) The novel begins with a dissident Russian poet beaten to death, and expands to take in small-time drug dealers, cloak-wearing women who act in walking mystery tours of the city, international oligarchs, and Scottish bank executives. A contemporary artist who makes sound installations may be in league with politicians agitating for Scotland�s independence. Rebus is as gruffly mischievous as ever, and the novel ends in a cliffhanger scene with his arch-enemy that will have readers gasping into the blank space that follows. Rankin�s work is crime fiction at its most consuming, cerebral best.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:1416572104 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: Kureishi�s latest novel returns to the subject of immigrant life in London�a theme that brought him early success, with the screenplay for �My Beautiful Laundrette� and the novel �The Buddha of Suburbia��but adds to it the jaundiced outlook of middle age. Jamal, an outwardly respectable psychoanalyst, harbors dark secrets, which generate the novel�s thrillerlike plot, and darker desires. Kureishi fulsomely depicts the sexual frustrations and adventures of a middle-aged man: �the underbelly�or potbelly, more like�of British suburban sexuality,� as one of Jamal�s many disaffected ex-girlfriends puts it. And therapy, an experience that a patient compares to �being stirred inside by a huge spoon,� provides Kureishi with fertile ground for caricature. At heart, however, this is a novel about guilt and retribution, as Jamal comes to terms with his past and realizes the terrible truth that �to conceal is to reveal.�
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:0810972980 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: Because Vanity Fair ran from 1913 to 1936, ceased publication, and then resumed in 1983, this dazzling panoply of twentieth-century fame has some striking absences: no Elvis, no Marilyn, no Beatles. The two resulting eras are presented not chronologically but mostly as a series of then-and-now diptychs: Clark Gable opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Fred and Adele Astaire opposite the Olsen twins, H. G. Wells opposite Tom Wolfe. (It�s presumably happenstance that Richard Perle is opposite Goebbels.) Comparing the two eras is hard. The later one is more excessive, but it often undercuts its own grandiosity with humor or menace, making earlier celebrity seem more innocent. If Edward Steichen�s Isadora Duncan against the Parthenon is the epochal image of the first run, Annie Leibovitz�s multi-person tableaux, as static and riddling as allegorical paintings, typify the current style. Occasionally, a subject (Salvador Dali) or a photographer (Horst P. Horst) had the longevity to figure in both periods.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393060233
• ISBN 13: 9780393060232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352