The Selected Essays of John Berger - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747554196 ISBN 13: 9780747554196

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2001

Synopsis

Booker wining novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and critic - even admirers rarely know John Berger in all his literary incarnations. This collection of essays will, for the first time, take a definitive look at his extraordinary career. Far from being footnotes to the main body of work Berger's essays are absolutely central to it. Many of the ideas of the groundbreaking Ways of Seeing were presented first in essays published in New Society. Polemical, reflective, radically original, Berger's wide-ranging essays emphasise the continuities that have underpinned more than 40 years of tireless intellectual inquiry and political engagement. Viewed chronologically they add up, in fact, to a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time as refracted through the prism of art. Edited by Geoff Dyer, and published on the occasion of his 75th birthday, this is an essential collection by one of the world's greatest writers.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

The writing career of John Berger-poet, storyteller, playwright, and essayist-has yielded some of the most original and compelling examinations of art and life of the past half century. In this essential volume, Geoff Dyer has brought together a rich selection of many of Berger's seminal essays.
Berger's insights make it impossible to look at a painting, watch a film, or even visit a zoo in quite the same way again. The vast range of subjects he addresses, the lean beauty of his prose, and the keenness of his anger against injustice move us to view the world with a new lens of awareness. Whether he is discussing the singleminded intensity of Picasso's "Guernica, the parallel violence and alienation in the art of Francis Bacon and Walt Disney, or the enigmatic silence of his own mother, what binds these pieces throughout is the depth and fury of Berger's passion, challenging us to participate, to protest, and above all, to see.

From the Back Cover:

"An important, not-to-be-missed chance to luxuriate in Berger's incomparable sagacity and visual sense." —The Washington Post

“[Berger’s grace] is in his way with words, and the infinite meanings he finds in that common but extraordinary thing, noticing.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Tenderness, and an unflagging interest in the experience of being human, infuse his work.” —Los Angeles Times

"Berger is one of the greatest living writers in the English language." —Buffalo News

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0747554196
• ISBN 13: 9780747554196
• Binding: Paperback