Selected essays
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references.

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, 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.