The Photographer's Eye

Book Description

The Photographer's Eye by John Szarkowski is a twentieth-century classic--an indispensable introduction to the visual language of photography. Based on a landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1964, and originally published in 1966, the book has long been out of print. It is now available again to a new generation of photographers and lovers of photography in this duotone printing that closely follows the original. Szarkowski's compact text eloquently complements skillfully selected and sequenced groupings of 172 photographs drawn from the entire history and range of the medium. Celebrated works by such masters as Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Steichen, Strand, and Weston are juxtaposed with vernacular documents and even amateur snapshots to analyze the fundamental challenges and opportunities that all photographers have faced. Szarkowski, the legendary curator who worked at the Museum from 1962 to 1991, has published many influential books. But none more radically and succinctly demonstrates why--as U.S. News & World Report put it in 1990--"whether Americans know it or not," his thinking about photography "has become our thinking about photography."

Customer Reviews:

John Szarkowski.......2007-07-23

When John Szarkowski recently passed away at the age of 81, the world lost one of photography's most important figures. He was the "Stieglitz" of the 1960s and 70s, changing the way audiences look at photographic images and he shaped the way future audiences will come to appreciate the pioneering work of Arbus, Eggleston, Friedlander and Winogrand. When he took over the reins of curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from Edward Steichen, photography's early twentieth century grand master, Szarkowski promoted a "new" photography that incorporated the everyday moment as it was unfolding on the streets around cities and towns across America.

His great gift to all of us who love photography besides his championing of new talent, was his incredible skill at writing texts, essays, criticism, books on photography. With his talent as a writer, and his background as a photographer, he was able to open a window onto this two-dimensional world of form and tone, shape, texture and composition, explaining the ins and outs, the subtleties, and the intuitions of image makers, their techniques and their medium in all its finesse.

Having simply tried to take a good photograph all his life, he simply knew a good photograph when he saw one. It is what made him such a great curator. His own best known books of photographs, "The Idea of Louis Sullivan" published in 1956, contains photographs of the architecture of Chicago, and his other, "The Face of Minnesota" published in 1958, contains haunting landscape images of his home state. He wrote the way he carefully crafted his own images. He framed each paragraph paying close attention to his ear, to diction and to all the elements of style. It is why I love to read him and why I think he was the greatest writer to take on this visual art form.

Two books of his about photography that in my opinion are indispensable are "The Photographer's Eye" first published in 1966, and "Looking at Photographs" first published in 1973. With these two collections, the reader will gain an historic appreciation of photography from its earliest innovators beginning in the 1830s to the period of high modernism in the 1970s. With Szarkowski as your guide, readers will appreciate how the medium advanced, yet they will also understand how it has remained fundamentally the same picture-making process when it comes to handling two-dimensional space.

In The Photographer's Eye, Szarkowski covers what a viewer needs to take in from a photograph, how it was framed, cropped, what the subject is, what the detail is, the focus and the vantage point. In each of these wide areas, he supplies important photographs from the Museum of Modern Art's vast collection that illustrate these points. He begins with "The Thing Itself" the "what" of photography, the landscape or still life, or portrait that the photographer has aimed his camera at. From there he moves on to how photographers fix on detail, the synechdocal "parts" that make up the "whole" and that produce visual metaphor: the close up of the hands, the side of a face, a rifle, a window, a headlight of a car, a door latch.

He then illustrates how photographers carefully frame their images, how they crop, how they envision the image from its interior picture plane to what is left out, alluded to, outside the frame. And finally, he shows how photographers measure time; freeze moments, single out the present for the past of some distant future. Added to this element of time is vantage, that trick of where to place the picture plane in terms of its perspective, foreground to background, its recession to a vanishing point or points, whether it is head-on and flat, or deep and endless, looming up or slanting down, the world from above, or the world from below.

In Looking at Photographs which is subtitled--"100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art," Szarkowski leads the reader across time, from the earliest best works of the 19th century masters: Timothy O'Sullivan, Fredrick Evans, Lewis Hine, and Jacob Riis, all the way to Robert Frank, Roy DeCarava, Paul Caponigro, and Joel Meyerowitz.

The book is printed so that there is a one-page essay facing each of the 100 photographs it describes. Within that compact structure, Szarkowski is able to move from one idea to another across the history of photography as the reader turns the pages, and he is able to pinpoint for the reader, the attributes that each photographer brings to his medium. In this way the reader learns to read images for their wealth of craft, form and subject matter. It is like having the curator take you on a personal guided tour of the museum's photography galleries.

I learned from reading this book that Timothy O'Sullivan's "white skies" were a result of the wet plate's over-sensitivity to blue light and that "sky areas were thus automatically overexposed, and rendered as blank white." I also learned that O'Sullivan "...accepted the white sky and used it as a shape, enclosed in tension between the picture's visual horizon and the edges of the plate." Knowing this, I can never look at O'Sullivan's work again without understanding how much this 19th century photographic pioneer wanted the figure-ground relationship of sky to land to feature in his compositions. And this is only one example from the book. There are 99 more.

Owning "Looking at Photographs" and "The Photographer's Eye" is like having your own private collection of the world's most famous photographs. The way you look at photographs will be enriched. On your next visit to a gallery or a museum, you will be able to see so much more thanks to the intelligent and thoughtful writing of John Szarkowski. His precise, clear and uncluttered prose style will make your reading experience a pleasure in itself.

Quality Control Issues.......2007-06-09

Great content in general, but the fact that several pages are presented upside down on my copy marred it for me.

The Photographer's Eye.......2006-03-01

SOME OF THE PHOTOGRAPHERS: Abbot Bravo Atget Avedon Belloc Brady Brandt Brassai Callahan Cameron Caponigro Cadtier-Bresson Coburn Decarava Doisneau Cuncan Erwitt Evans Fenton Frank Friedlander Garnett Giacomelli Kertesz Lange Lartigue Laughlin Lyon Moholy-Nagy Muybridge,P>Negre Newman O'sullivan Penn Sander Sheeler Siskind Smith Steichen Strand Weston White WinograndThis book is an investigation of what photographs look like, and of why they look that way. It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic tradition: with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work. A wonderful black and white study of the form of photography and covers photographic style and tradition with a beautiful collection of some of the world's most famous photographic images.

SZARKOWSKI'S CAREER AT MOMA is bookended by two of his most ambitious and influential exhibitions, The Photographer's Eye (1964) and Photography until Now (1989-90). These shows, along with the accompanying volumes of criticism, summarize Szarkowski's major concerns as an historian and theorist of photography and demonstrate his impact on the field.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S EYE introduced the then-radical notion that artistic merit could be located not only in the work of the avowed masters-Stieglitz, Steichen, the WPA group--but also in news photographs, magazine spreads, commercial work, and anonymous documentary photography. The exhibition juxtaposed, without comment, Cartier-Bresson's masterpiece "Children Playing in Ruins" with a street scene taken outside a Stillwater, Minnesota barber shop. The work of contemporary giant Lee Friedlander rubbed elbows unashamedly with a 1910 bedroom interior plucked from the Iconographic Collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. In the companion book, published in 1966, Szarkowski asserts that the pictures in the exhibition "have in fact little in common except their success, and a shared vocabulary: these pictures are unmistakably photographs. The vision they share belongs to no school or aesthetic theory, but to photography itself." -Christopher Sieving

Average customer rating:

Great Book

Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye
Gilles Mora , and John T. Hill
Manufacturer: Harry N. Abrams
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 081099187X

Book Description

Walker Evans (1903-1975) ranks with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand as one of America's greatest photographers. When originally published in 1994, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye was the first book to survey every significant aspect of the artist's oeuvre. This reduced-format version, identical in content to the previous volume, includes 300 beautiful duotone photographs.

Evans was largely self-educated and began photographing regularly in 1927, using a small hand-held camera. He specialized in the life of the street-carefully observed views of American architecture, the roadside, and the people who lived in the nation's cities, towns, and villages. Beginning with Evans's early abstractions, continuing through his three-year involvement with the Farm Security Administration and his breakthrough exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and concluding with the artist's experimentation with color late in his life, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye remains the most complete and authoritative view of this American photographic master. AUTHOR BIO: Gilles Mora has been editor-in-chief of Cahiers de la Photographie since 1981. He has written essays for two collections of Walker Evans material. John T. Hill, a friend and colleague of Evans and the executor of his estate, has coedited three book collections of the photographer's work.

Customer Reviews:

Great Book.......2005-08-18

This book is very informative of Walker Evans. It shows a wide variety of his work form portraiture to architecture, from the streets of New York to exotic places. It not only shows the works of art but also shows short blurbs about the place he was at and what was happening in his life; like why he was there and what he wanted out of the photo shoot.

The part I like best about this book is that it references whose work he was admiring at the time. It also references his feelings, whether it was something he hated or something that was inspiring him. The print of the book is also very representational. It shows in great detail the contrast and depth of the works of art. I give the book 5 stars. I really enjoyed reading the book.

The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life

Average customer rating:

Phyiscs and Consciousness
Thoughtful, but sometimes misleading.
The Nature of Consciousness and the Meaning of Life
A great reference for quantum physics in real life
Double fantasy

The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life
Evan Harris Walker
Manufacturer: Perseus Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Amazon.com

It's not every day you hear a physicist ask what happens when we die. Evan Harris Walker, sparked by the early, tragic loss of his love, does just that and more in The Physics of Consciousness, a book in the same vein as Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, but with a firmer grounding in scientific understanding. Walker marries the traditions of Southern literature--a longing for the past, a resignation toward the present, and a determined optimism about the future--to a technical explanation of the limits of materialism; a weird synthesis, certainly, but charming and engaging nonetheless. Since his primary topic is consciousness, Walker turns to neuroscience and Buddhism (its spiritual equivalent) for inspiration. His quantum-mechanical approach to synaptic transmission and "the speed of consciousness" are difficult to evaluate and seem a bit overstretched, but his discussions of the history and current events of physics are lucid and ironically lend weight to his antimaterialistic arguments. Is this, as he hopes, another step toward 21st-century religion, or just another New Age reinterpretation of the spooky world of the ultrasmall? Don't bet on either--The Physics of Consciousness will jog your brain in new ways and, if nothing else, you'll find a new appreciation for how little we really know about ourselves. --Rob Lightner

Book Description

How quantum physics will explain the nature of reality and the human mind. For decades, neuroscientists, psychologists, and an army of brain researchers have been struggling, in vain, to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Now there is a clear trail to the answer, and it leads through the dense jungle of quantum physics, Zen, and subjective experience, and arrives at an unexpected destination. In this tour-de-force of scientific investigation, Evan Harris Walker shows how the operation of bizarre yet actual properties of elementary particles support a new and exciting theory of reality, based on the principles of quantum physics-a theory that answers questions such as "What is the nature of consciousness, of will?" "What is the source of material reality?" and "What is God?"

"A breathtaking journey into the very atoms of the brain...In his rare fusion of intellectual ambition with emotional urgency, Walker exposes the emptiness of a science that avoids the ultimate questions." -Booklist

Customer Reviews:

Phyiscs and Consciousness.......2006-07-05

Physics and consciousness are hot topics in the quantum community and this book goes on to correlate between the outside reality (physical) and the inside reality (spiritual) It gives you a new way of looking at reality and to understand that different planes of realities exist. This is an excellent book.

Regards,
Enigma Valdez

Thoughtful, but sometimes misleading........2006-04-03

Evan Harris Walker has written an entirely different book than you may have expected from reading the title. Certainly, the book discusses all of what is included in the title, but with a trifle more sophistication than I had expected. Readers who are not already familiar with thinking about Quantum Theory and philosophy of mind will probably find the book a rough ride. While Walker takes pains to explain the concepts, his are not certainly not the clearest available.

What is unnerving to me about this book is the lack of respect paid to the unwitting non-specialist reader. Walker argues for a specific interpretation of quantum theory, an interpretation from which the rest of his argument laregly hangs, but fails to duly note the capriciousness of his philosophical choices. The fact is that his interpretation is based on an intuition, one that he tries to force down the reader's throat via an emotional and tragic tale from his past. He uses the story, which is weaved throughout the narrative, to cultivate the appropriate emotional response from his reader so that his interpretations and philosophical presuppositions look inevitable. He is quite masterful actually, but the uninitiated reader will probably not be able to see through the rhetoric.

Walker's intuitions are certainly well argued for in this book and, if they match your own, you will probably find this book to be a powerful confirmation for what you already believed. However, please be aware that Walker's interpretations and opinions are not necessary conclusions from science and are not the only consistent approaches to interpretation. This book is, then, an exploration in the justification of a faith via various lines of evidence from science, philosophy and experience. Recommended to the experienced reader.

The Nature of Consciousness and the Meaning of Life.......2006-03-25

The Nature of Consciousness and the Meaning of Life
Michael J. Vandeman, Ph.D.
December 20, 2005
Copyright(c) Michael J. Vandeman, 2005

"Consciousness is not to be found among physical objects", E. H. Walker, p.147

I think that there must be very few books that live up to the promise implicit in their title. It is very tempting to exaggerate, in order to get people to buy the book. (By contrast, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, one of my favorite books, does discuss leaves of grass, but also a lot more!) As far as I can tell, Evan Harris Walker's The Physics of Consciousness: Quantum Minds and the Meaning of Life discusses neither the physics of consciousness, quantum minds, nor the meaning of life.

Woven throughout the book is a very charming and entertaining thread devoted to describing Walker's relationship with his high school sweetheart, Merilyn Ann Zehnder, and her tragic death from leukemia. I enjoyed this glimpse into the author's life, but I don't see how it contributed to fulfilling the book's promise. I suppose it gave some "human interest" to a book that otherwise could be too taxing on the brain, or served as a dramatic device -- interrupting the physics thread and creating suspense.

For me, by far the greatest value of the book was the fascinating and very detailed recounting of the history of physics -- especially the description of particle physics and quantum mechanics. It's comforting to know that quantum mechanics and relativity are an accurate reflection of the world -- all of it! It's also fascinating to watch humanity (who, according to Reg Morrison (The Spirit in the Gene), are genetically predisposed to spirituality or religion) be forced to relinquish one myth after another to the persuasive power of science. Walker's writing is lucid and generally easy to understand -- quite a feat, considering the difficulty of the subject matter and the fact that its essence can be expressed only in mathematical form! For me the book brought together numerous disparate bits of physics that I hadn't fully grasped or integrated. For that, I am very grateful.

Walker then takes a giant leap and asserts, without citing any evidence, that consciousness is different from anything ever studied or described by physics -- it's "special". He seems to assume that this is so obvious that it doesn't need proof, but, on the contrary, not only does it require evidence, but it is actually false, which derails the rest of his arguments. Remember, he has just finished describing the fact that current physical theories describe the entire universe (at least since it was 10-43 seconds old), from subatomic particles to galaxies, with enormous precision! So it is illogical to suddenly claim that there is something -- consciousness -- which is not described by those equations! (And yet, he later contradicts himself by equating consciousness with a quantum mechanical "tunneling" of electrons.) That consciousness is "special" is an assumption. If it falls, then the rest of the book -- and probably all other writing and thinking about consciousness -- also falls.

Here are some of Walker's statements in support of this assumption: "Science is incomplete and must be greatly expanded if it is to meet the challenge of this data." (p.159) "If we approach what is in those equations [of physics] exclusively in terms of those ideas physicists have put there, we will see that there are some things that are missing and that cannot be derived from the things that have gone into those equations. The equations have positions and intervals, quantities and forms, and they describe responses. But feelings are not there, nor is pain, C#, or the colors we see in the budding red rose. 'Motives' are there, but emotions are not. Conscious being is not in these equations. [That is an assumption! In other words, he is begging the question, not answering it.] If consciousness is to play its role in physics, it must be included in its own right, on its own terms. [That's funny -- ethics, philosophy, art, music appreciation, and government are also not in those equations, but no one has ever suggested that we need to expand physics in order to explain them!]. ... It will be necessary to introduce something new into physics on its own terms. This is how it has always been in physics when we have wished to understand something totally new. This is how we must do things now." (p.176) "Consciousness is something that exists in its own right and has its own identity. It is distinct from all other objects, processes, energies, and realities that physics or science as a whole reveals." (p.178) "Consciousness is nonphysical. ... It is real and nonphysical." (p.182) "The classical machine cannot have consciousness, and it cannot have any identity of its own." (p.253)

Walker then describes his theory of the functioning of the synapse, and argues that consciousness is the quantum mechanical "tunneling" of electrons across the synapse: "There, in those minute switches, at the miniscule intersynaptic cleft -- that is where the quantitative link between mind and brain is to be found." (p.194)

He then goes on to make the absurd assertion that nothing exists until it is observed by a conscious observer! "Only our observation of the object [a die thrown onto a craps table] leads it to take on one out of all its possible orientations and come to rest with one of its six faces up." (p.270) "We have seen matter and space as the natural consequence of nothing more than the fact that conscious observers exist." (p.331) In order to understand this assertion, we need to think about quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Heisenberg showed that when one tries to measure either the location or momentum of an object, the act of measuring itself disturbs the object, so that one can determine either characteristic to arbitrary precision, but not both. This is not simply a defect in our equipment! This is the fundamental nature of matter! For example, if we shoot an electron at a phosphorescent target, until it hits the target and creates a flash of light, it has no position, but exists only as an infinite set of possible locations and momenta, with varying degrees of probability.

But it is not the observer that determines where and how the die will land! It is the table and the forces of gravity and electromagnetism! The observer enters the picture only after the die has settled into its final resting position. This is Walker's means of injecting (human, or at least animal) consciousness (and, ultimately, meaning and God) into physics. It fails. (However, I wish that Walker had spent more time on this matter, since it is the crux of his argument. I had trouble following the part that centered on Bell's Theorem, where supposedly quantum mechanics triumphs, and belief in concrete reality has a stake driven through its heart. This section (Chapter 8) was intriguing, but very difficult to understand.)

In mathematics there is a tool called "reductio ad absurdum". One makes an assumption, and then argues logically from that assumption to arrive at a conclusion that is "absurd" (obviously false). That proves that the assumption upon which the argument was based must be false (for example, one can assume that a number exists which is zero divided by zero; from this one can "prove" that 1 = 2). Thus, in the present case, the assumption that consciousness exists as something "special", not describable by physics, is false: it leads to absurd conclusions.

The other serious error that Walker makes is that he identifies consciousness with wakefulness. The state of being awake, which, according to my physiology text, is controlled by the brain's reticular activating system, is only one meaning of "conscious" ("having mental faculties undulled by sleep, faintness, or stupor: awake" (Webster, p.238)). The more important use of the word is being conscious of something: "aware of and responding to one's surroundings" (Compact Oxford English Dictionary). Wakefulness is a necessary (except possibly for dreams), but not a sufficient, condition for being aware of something. Although I am awake, I am rarely aware (conscious) of the traffic outside my house, nor even the temperature of my own skin. I am very good at focusing on one thing, and ignoring everything else. (No wonder we men are so often accused of being "insensitive"!)

A third serious error is that Walker identifies consciousness with something that takes place in a very specific location: the nerve synapse. This would imply that organisms without nerves cannot be conscious. However, Donald Griffin (Animal Thinking) has argued convincingly that thinking (complex decision-making) goes back as far as single-celled organisms, which are aware of chemicals in their environment and respond appropriately -- approaching or avoiding them based on whether they represent food, mate, or threat. Green plants detect (are aware of) sunlight and turn their leaves so as to maximize the energy they receive. Humans are genetically 98.6% identical with chimpanzees, so it is unlikely that so important a characteristic as consciousness could be present in humans but not in chimps. But we also share a large percentage of our genome with all animals, and in fact with all living things! Since consciousness (awareness of things and events outside the organism) is so integral to all life, it most likely is not simply a matter or nerve synapses, and probably is an essential feature of all living things: "All living beings, not just animals but plants and microorganisms, perceive. ... Mind and body, perceiving and living, are equally self-referring, self-reflexive processes already present in the earliest bacteria". (Margulis & Sagan, p.32) "Life ... is awareness and responsiveness; it is consciousness and even self-consciousness." (ibid., p.177) "Mobile microbes make selections -- they choose." (ibid., p.179) "The gulf between us and other organic beings is a matter of degree, not of kind." (ibid., p.182) "Thinking and being are the same thing." (ibid., p.188)

So how can we determine what consciousness is? Obviously, the laws of physics that apply within living organisms are identical to the laws that hold outside them. Walker admits that the laws of physics apply to the entire known universe. ("Life is less mechanistic than we have been taught to believe [we obey probabilistic quantum mechanics, rather than the deterministic Newtonian physics]; yet, since it disobeys no chemical or physical law, it is not vitalistic [i.e., there is nothing "magic" or "special" about life]." (Margulis & Sagan, p.178)) But this implies that there is nothing "special" about life -- nor about consciousness! And it implies that anything that can happen inside a living organism can also happen outside living things (if a distinction between living things and nonliving things even makes sense) -- including consciousness! The splitting of H2O into hydrogen and oxygen takes place in green plants, but it can also happen outside them. Every event that can happen within a living organism can potentially (given the right conditions) also happen outside them. In fact, if we assume that life and consciousness are "special", then (by reductio ad absurdum) it follows that they don't exist! No wonder they are so hard to define and describe! It is hard to define something that doesn't exist (such as, for example, God). ...

So what is consciousness? Simply the registering of an effect. A scale is conscious of weight. It is not conscious of (able to measure) anything else. If it could be arranged so as to weigh itself (I don't know if that is physically possible), then it would be self-conscious (in that one dimension). We are also capable of being conscious of weight. I can feel pressure on my skin from a weight resting on top of it, and I can also hold the weight in my hand and feel the strain on my arm muscles. These are just two possible ways of being conscious of weight, neither of which is the same method used by the scale. I am also conscious of light, which the scale is not. But I am not conscious of ultraviolet radiation, although a bee and a UV meter are. A robot is conscious, but not of enough things to survive on its own -- not enough to survive in this rough-and-tumble world. Humans are visually conscious of the movement of distant objects, but we are nowhere as perceptive as birds. Of course, being conscious of more dimensions doesn't make one superior, except in the narrow sense of those dimensions. Bacteria are undoubtedly superior in their consciousness of chemical nuances. In any case, there are obviously many ways to be conscious, not just one, just as there are many different ways to store information. Consciousness is not a fundamental constituent of reality -- nor anything new or unitary.

To show how life and non-life (whatever they are, if they even exist!) shade into each other, look at a couple of examples. Frogs in Canada freeze solid every winter and thaw out again in the spring. While frozen, they are neither alive (they don't meet any of Margulis and Sagan's criteria, since they are doing absolutely nothing) nor dead (death is, by definition, final). Okay, maybe you believe that the frozen frogs are alive, and doing something, although you don't know what. The frogs don't contain much extra energy, so if they were doing anything, all their stored energy would get used up, and they would have none left to allow them to awaken in the spring. If that example doesn't convince you, then look at the seeds stored in the pyramids for 3,000 years. Dead, or alive? Since they were able to germinate upon being given water, they couldn't have been dead, according to Margulis and Sagan and every other biologist. But they can't have been alive either, because if they were doing anything during those 3,000 years, all of their tiny store of energy would have long since been exhausted. Viruses and prions are two more examples of life shading into non-life; viruses are not considered alive, but they perform some of the same functions as living things, such as reproduction. In other words, it is not possible to detect the difference between life and non-life: i.e., there is no real difference! Life is an indefinable state of matter, kind of like (but even less definable than) the liquid- vs. solid state of water.

Thus, the real mystery is not consciousness; the real mystery is how humans can miss what is "hidden" in plain sight -- right in front of our noses! Obviously, we can't know directly whether any other organism is conscious. We can only infer that from its behavior. That goes for our own friends and family, pre-verbal or dumb (unable to talk) humans, animals, plants, bacteria, etc. Bacteria and protists (e.g. protozoa) act as if they are conscious. Or perhaps I should say that we sometimes act like them -- turning our faces toward the sun, sniffing out attractive smells from the kitchen, reacting instinctively to environmental hazards. Try this experiment: turn on the television, but turn off the sound. You will be amazed at the things you become conscious of (the mole on an actor's nose, the blond hair and brown eyebrows, the funny way people move, etc.), that you had been forced to ignore due to trying to follow (be conscious of) the (verbal) story. Meditation is another experiment in consciousness. Try meditating on the self-conscious scale. ... It's no wonder that no one has discovered what consciousness is. If consciousness is a white horse (or nothing special at all), but you insist that it is a green dragon, you can look all you want, but you will never find it. ...

Two more things remain to be discussed: will, and the meaning of life. On page 333 Walker admits: "But for all this terror, there is one thing that is worse: the thought that all the suffering and all the pleasure of life have no meaning." I don't see how the meaning of my life, or any life, depends on the existence or importance of consciousness. While life has no single, canonical meaning (else we would long ago have discovered what it is!), each person's life has -- to them -- the meaning that he or she chooses to give it. (Of course, we get some ideas from others, past or present.) The same goes for morality and ethics: what is moral is what we think (based partially on input from others) is moral. Science and physics have little to do with any of this, except to keep us honest. Science can only tell us what is, never if it should be. Therefore it cannot be blamed for any alleged decline in morality. I suspect that "immorality" is like a recessive gene -- impossible to eliminate. We also can't depend on evolution to "improve" humankind. Evolution is like justice: blind. It only ensures the survival of those who survive -- not necessarily those with any given characteristic (including alleged "fitness", whatever that is).

Then what about free will? (Walker simply refers to "will", and sidesteps this question.) The fall of Newton's deterministic physics, and the triumph of "probabilistic" quantum mechanics, implies that our behavior is neither predetermined nor predictable. (That's nice! It would be pretty boring, otherwise!) The "butterfly effect" rules. But this also doesn't imply that our behavior is under our own control. And since it is apparently decided at a molecular (hence quantum) level, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents us from ever knowing causation for certain. In other words, we probably don't have free will, but we have no way of ever knowing for sure, and we feel that we have free will, so ... who cares? (Well, the criminal justice system may care, thinking that people should only be held responsible for what they deliberately do. But it's impossible to know for sure, and ... nature (evolution) doesn't care.)
In spite of centuries of thought and research into human-, animal, and plant behavior we still don't know why people commit murder -- or much else. Can you resist eating that cookie? If humans were rational, no one would smoke, right? I know that I am irrational, because no matter how often I see people behave irrationally, I still continue trying to treat them as if they were rational, by reasoning with them!

This paper would be incomplete without discussing the purpose of life -- something Walker skipped, even though he is obviously interested in it. The purpose of life is to have fun! I mean, what else could it be?! (Of course, that excludes hurting wildlife or other people, even if you happen to think that that's fun.) And I certainly had fun reading this book, and thinking about it. ...

(...)

A great reference for quantum physics in real life.......2006-02-02

I was given this book by a friend several years ago, along with another book on quantum physics. This book stood out because of the approach Walker took to presenting his material. I had many insights into quantum physics as it relates to my own life while reading this book (three times so far), but the gem of the book in my opinion is contained in the appendix. I come back to Walker's insights into consciousness as presented in the last part of the book, and in the appendix many times to refresh my understanding of how quantum physics applies to my daily experience in life. This is particularly interesting when looking at how events affect my consciousness, and has given me insight into how to apply quantum physics in my daily life. Outstanding book to read, but if you have only a passing interest in quantum physics, you may want to prepare yourself to take more of an interest in the subject, as this book will be much more rewarding if you do.

Double fantasy.......2006-01-08

In this insightful work, "The Physics of Consciousness" Evan Harris Walker concludes that "Consciousness is Reality." Many philosophers and scientist have suggested that consciousness can never be explained because of its subjective nature, but Walker disagrees.

Methodically quantifying the various processes involved in information exchange in the brain in terms of "bits", Walker is able to extrapolate approximations of the speed and capacities of the information being manipulated in neural activities.

With this information in hand, Walker proceeds to treat the mind/brain activities in Descartean fashion, maintaining that in order to fully understand the relationship between the part and the whole, a dualistic notion of mind and matter must be entertained. The dualities of wave vs. particle, and observer vs. observed in the strange quantum world of state vector collapse, give us a clue as to what transpires in the brain.

Walker contends that the 24 trillion synapses in the brain delineate the transition point beween mind and matter. Most have rejected quantum effects across the synapses because of the relatively large distances and energy it takes to make the leap, but these individuals have not taken into account several known facets of quantum physics such as the principles of tunneling, indistinguishability, and state vertor collapse.

Walker says that the mind itself consists of two parts--consciousness and "will". Consciousness does not have to be a part of a living entity, but is a factor in all quantum events in nature. The "will", which defines what we are, is the catalyst that collapses the wave function into one discrete, non-local event from a myriad of possibilities. According to the principles established by Bell's non-locality theorem, this state vector collapse travels out into the universe at large, and always maintains a link to our individual and collective minds. As a bonus, Walker has answered another mystery as deep as consciousness itself--the nature of time. Time is real and asymmetrical. It is the irreversibility of the state vector collapse that gives time its arrow.

This is without exception the most satisfying and believable description of the naure of consciousness I have read to date. This work is a bit difficult at times for the non-scientist, but in the end patients pays off. With great effort he has made the concepts of the principles of "indistinguishability" and "non-locality" understandable, and he has brought us to a definitive link between mind, time, and nature.

Even so, I found his distinctions between consciousness, thought, and "will" a bit confusing if not contradictory at times. But he has something very important to say about the nature of mind. And, as a result of his thorough understanding of quantum theory, he has come closer than previous scholars to finally nailing down the nature of consciousness.

Running parallel to his main thesis is a delightful reminiscence of his high school lover who died after graduation in the summer of 1952. Excerpts from his diary and rememberances of the lost love of days gone by, make Walker's work both a scholarly and endearing tale.

This review by David Kreiter Author of "Quantum Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective"

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Photo Fine Art

Walker Evans & Company
Peter Galassi , Glenn Lowry , Stuart Davis , Edward Hopper , Roy Lichtenstein , and Ed Ruscha
Manufacturer: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0870700324
Release Date: 2002-07-02

Book Description

Walker Evans' radical photography of the 1930s demonstrated that unembellished photographic fact could serve as a highly poetic language. These works expanded the potential of the art of photography and at the same time defined a lasting iconography that recognized advertising, movies, and car culture as central images of modern American identity. Walker Evans & Company focuses on Evans as a central figure in the arts of the 1920s and 30s, and includes works in photography and other mediums that influenced Evans or were influenced by him, or which resonate in a significant way with aspects of his imagery, sensibility, and style. Among the other artists whose work is featured are: Eugene Atget, Mathew Brady, Stuart Davis, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Edward Hopper, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, August Sander, Andy Warhol, and Edward Weston. Published in conjunction with the second of three cycles of millennial exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Customer Reviews:

Photo Fine Art.......2007-05-21

Peter Galassi focuses on Evans as one of the great photographers of the twentieth century who also had a huge influence on many American photographers (and some contemporary graphic artists) and the ten visual chapters in this beautiful book provide a convincing case.

Photography as an art form has had a hard time proving it. Unlike fine art paintings, which exist as an entity, photography has mainly presented a visual record in many printed mediums (newspapers, magazines, advertising, packaging, posters) all seen by the public but not as art. Walker Evans helped to change that perception in America.

The first two chapters are interesting because Galassi features photographers who influenced Evans, especially Eugene Atget and his studies of Paris. The remaining eight each start with work by Evans then the chapter theme is carried on by other well-known photographers (and artists) who drew inspiration from the style and subject matter in his work. The hundred creative folk featured are a who's who of American photography since the 1940s.

Just over three hundred images are shown printed in an impressively fine screen (more than 250dpi) that brings out the wonderful detail in so many of them. Galassi contributes a fine introduction and each photographer get a comprehensive list of their photos in the back of the book. Overall I thought this was a fascinating survey American art photography whose origins clearly owe so much to Walker Evans.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South

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If nothing else, certainly brilliant and thought-provoking
Topic great, writers not so great.
I thought I hated it at points, but I've never been able to get it out of my head.
A Classic
A Puzzle to be piece together....

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South
James Agee , and Walker Evans
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0618127496

Amazon.com

Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words.

Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.

Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. --Mary Park

Book Description

In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives was called intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and is "renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality" (New York Times). Today it stands as a poetic tract of its time, recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. With an elegant new design as well as a sixty-four-page photographic prologue of Evans's classic images, reproduced from archival negatives, this sixtieth anniversary edition reintroduces the legendary author and photographer to a new generation.

Customer Reviews:

If nothing else, certainly brilliant and thought-provoking.......2006-09-16

Let us Now Praise Famous Men, in all its poetry and prose, reminds me of an epic, like the Hindu Mahabharata or Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The lyrical narrative reveals just as much, if not more about Agee, than his subjects. His writing style excludes his subjects as readers.

His prose, which tends to be lofty and cerebral, is also beautiful and brilliant. But, I often wondered, who he was
writing for? The New Yorker audience? The distance in his observations often left me feeling cold. I imagine these hardworking sharecroppers exhibiting some joy, some evidence of warmth, of hope. But I had difficulty finding it in Agee's voice.

The length of Agee's sentences and paragraphs were long, each containing an entire scene, and I labored through them, hoping sleep would not steal me from a passage I might not finish. It was as though Agee too, was afraid sleep would come and steal him from his mission, and so kept hacking away at each sentence, adding commas and colons and semi-colons, lingering his thoughts across the page.

Whatever level of consciousness Agee existed, I could not hang with him for any more than a couple of sentences, as I would fall off the page and have to find my way back into the scene. Where was I? You get the picture...

Agee also uses parenthesis and colons, often not giving his parenthesis a mate: (This struck me as rather unusual and often, cold and detached--more like a voyeur. Did he fabricate his own method of communication using punctuation or was this being done elsewhere at the time? I felt left out of his thoughts when he did this, like when two people are communicating via sign language and you can't make out a word they're saying. Was he doing this in a way to urge us to "think," to stretch beyond the ordinary conventions and try something on that is foreign and unfamiliar, like his subjects and their hardship?

Topic great, writers not so great........2006-05-27

The eloquence of composition surely necessitated infinite use of superlatives and verbs, resulting in a requisite painstaking remostrance to the reader, thus fettering the effusion and disembogulation of the document. In other words, wouldn't it have been better to just leave all of the fluff out of the book and just write as if the reader is someone other than the Queen of England? If you can weed through all of excessive use poems and verbs, it's a halfway decent book

I thought I hated it at points, but I've never been able to get it out of my head........2005-09-23

This book is an amazing work of art. At times it's baffling, and at times almost impertinent--like when the author decides to describe every object in an entire home, and yet in all these things and in all the conflicting emotions it evokes, it creates a mood and a feeling and a setting that will seep into your skin and fog your brain for months.
The writing is beautiful, the story it tells--of poor, sharecropping, depression-era families--is heartbreaking, and the experience of reading about it all is like a baptism by fire. This book just might re-wire your brain.
I think this is a much better read than Agee's "A Death in the Family," and that one won the Pulitzer Prize. Read this, for sure.
I read it on a bus trip across Guatemala, and the way Agee's descriptions of the old southern poverty fit the poor little towns full of Guatemalan coffee pickers was uncanny.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and let us start with James Agee.

UPDATE: It's years later, and this book has never stopped haunting me. I think of it almost daily. If I were to review it today, I would definitely give it Five Stars.

A Classic.......2005-08-05

Excellent editon of this wonderful, classic work. A series of visual and verbal snapshots of the South as a third world country, the South of the 1930's.

A Puzzle to be piece together...........2004-04-12

James Agee's book on the sharecroppers of the American south during the great depression is a book not to be taken lightly. I read this book for a college english class and I can honestly say that most people in the course including myself are confused by Agee's intent and purpose. Agee's highly lyrical and philosophical tone allows a deep analysis into the question of human existence in the depression south. Yet, the very scope and difficulty of his subject is expressed in his confused, perhaps confusing writing. There are lonely moments of insight stacked alongside pages of seemingly irrelevant and baseless speculation. I say seemingly because each time I re-read the passage I find that Agee's words have quite a bit more meaning than I had originally found. This book is not a novel, not journalism but a puzzle which Agee could not piece together. Only with time and care can the reader hope to understand the frustratingly complex yet real message of Agee's work.

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An Essential Walker Evans Book
"Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary" by John T. Hill
A uniquely fresh look at the photographs of Walker Evans

Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary
John T. Hill
Manufacturer: Steidl
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3865210228
Release Date: 2006-11-15

Book Description

Walker Evans's career spread over 46 fitful and prolific years, yet in a scant two, 1935-1936, he produced the singular body of work that came to define him. During that brief time, while working for the Farm Security Administration (previously the U.S. Resettlement Administration) photographing the consequences of the Great Depression, he refined a hybrid style that combined documentation with sly personal comment. He delighted in traveling incognito as an artless photojournalist, but with the independence to satisfy his own artistic designs. Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary presents these seminal images for the first time as a comprehensive, cohesive body of work, in chronological order. These are prime examples of Evans's alchemy, his seemingly effortless transformation of mundane fact into sweeping lyricism. They not only define his mature style, but also offer a path for artists of future generations. Evans has been called the most important American artist of his century, and the impact of his vision reaches well beyond the province of photography. With texts by John T. Hill, Heinz Liesbrock and Allan Trachtenberg.

Customer Reviews:

An Essential Walker Evans Book.......2007-07-05

At once a splendid coffee table book and an impressive work of original scholarship, "Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary," by John T. Hill, has much to please nearly everyone. The duotone black and white reproductions are sumptuous, among the finest I have seen. They illustrate Evans' seminal production during the years 1935-36, photographing for the US Government's Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. Their selection, presented in chronological order, is a fine mix of the familiar - many of Evans' greatest images - with lesser known works and variants. Of particular interest to me is a plate comprised of two consecutive exposures that the author has joined together into a powerful panorama (pp. 158-59), a risky move that he manages in bravura fashion.

John T. Hill has written, co-written, or edited, to my count, at least nine books and catalogs on Walker Evans, including "Walker Evans First and Last," "Walker Evans At Work," "Walker Evans The Hungry Eye," "Walker Evans Simple Secrets," and "Walker Evans: Havana 1933." As Evans' friend and colleague for ten years at Yale University, and then as executor of Evans' estate for twenty years, John Hill is uniquely qualified to discuss the photographer and his work. And as a printer of Evans' photographs for nearly forty years, Mr. Hill possesses a thorough understanding of this photographer's oeuvre and intentions.

John Hill's two essays - one on an unpublished lecture Evans gave at Yale, illustrating what the photographer called his "aesthetic autobiography," and the other a short history of Evans' book publications within the context of their times - are important additions to Evans scholarship. Additionally, Alan Trachtenberg has provided an illustrated essay comparing the image selection and sequencing of the two major editions (1941 and 1960) of Evans' and James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."

Of the countless books and articles that have been written about Evans in the thirty-plus years since his death, "Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary" is among the best. It is one of a few that I would classify as an essential Walker Evans book.

Rodger Kingston
Kingston is the author of "Walker Evans In Print: An Illustrated Bibliography."

"Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary" by John T. Hill.......2007-05-25

Walker Evans' famous gift as a photographer is said to be his ability to erase himself as the creator of the images he captured, but he was there, of course, and made the necessary artistic judgments that distinguish his work. John T. Hill's masterful book, "Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary" is, in every way, an apt tribute to Evans' artistry.

Giving us a comprehensive presentation of the best work from Evans' most creative period is valuable enough. Yet Hill has provided something equally wonderful and useful, by illustrating what Evans called his "aesthetic autobiography." Using an unpublished lecture at Yale, in which Evans identified works of art, architecture and science he viewed as inspirations for his work, Hill furnishes compelling examples from these artists as visual annotations to Evans' work.

The result is exactly what one would hope for--not a laborious reinterpretation or egotistical "appreciation" of these great photographs, but a vivid presentation of the images themselves in a fashion that invites interest in the background material as an additional reward for the viewer. "Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary" is John T. Hill's fifth book on Evans and provides new insights into the work of the legendary photographer, considered by many to be the greatest artist of our time. This book is a great achievement by Hill, although fittingly, the reader will scarcely notice the skilled editorial hand shaping and ordering these powerful photographs that need little adornment.

Randall Roden

A uniquely fresh look at the photographs of Walker Evans.......2007-03-14

This is the only book I know of that contains Evans' own account of his aesthetic genesis with illustrations of his visual sources. Excellent essay by John T. Hill, who was a colleague of Evans at Yale University. Particularly noteworthy are the very finely reproduced plates of the seminal work of Evans during the years 1935-36. These are easily the best reproductions of Evans photographs that I've seen. A scholarly work and an important research tool.

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Stark Photographs and Luminous Little Poems
The combo of poetry/photos will make your heart ache.
Beautiful book!

Something Permanent
Cynthia Rylant
Manufacturer: Harcourt Children's Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0152770909

Book Description

The photographs of Walker Evans tell stories of ordinary people living in America in the extraordinary time of the Great Depression. Cynthia Rylant’s poetry about the photographs offers a new voice in the telling, celebrating the beauty of life lived in extreme circumstances.

Customer Reviews:

Stark Photographs and Luminous Little Poems.......2007-04-04

Cynthia Rylant has done the un-doable. She's written simple, beautiful, stark little amazing poems describing simple, beautiful, stark black and white photographs taken during the great Depression. Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words, didn't know Ms. Rylant. For instance, next to a photograph of a very tall tree limb stuck in the ground with several gourd bird houses hanging haphazardly from it is this poem:

Birdhouses

People said they were
a good excuse
for looking up.

That's the shortest poem in the book, but it's perfect for the photo. As soon as I read the last poem, I wanted to order copies of this book for every poetry-loving friend I have and scream, "STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND READ THIS RIGHT NOW!"

Life is too, too short NOT to read poetry. It's life affirming, inspiring and uplifting. If only for a moment, it takes us outside of our selves and gives us a glimpse of pure Spirit. I've always believed that God can be found in the blank spaces between the words and this book of photos and poems only proves my theory. In the beginning was the word and the word was God. He's there in the words and the spaces. Buy this book and read it over and over and definitely give it to your friends and family. Even is you don't care for poetry, the photographs will speak to your heart and feed your spirit.

The combo of poetry/photos will make your heart ache........1998-11-10

Walker Evans' photos speak volumes without any poetry alongside them but Cynthia Rylant did a superb job of complementing the photos with her gritty observations. I bought this book several years ago and have read it numerous times since. Just looking at his brutally honest snapshots of the hard times (supposedly) gone by was worth the books' price but just as you think you've absorbed all the beauty his photographs hold, you look over to read her accompanying poem and your heart aches a little more! This book is beautiful and moving - there are really no other words to describe it! It truly makes one relate to and hurt for the suffering/troubles of the people in the photos. And, one should always keep in mind, just because the photos were taken so long ago doesn't mean there aren't still people in the grip of poverty (& classism, suffering, depression, etc.) just as badly as the people whose images were captured in Evans' photos so many years ago. I've not really done that great a job explaining just how moving this book is but I guarantee you'll find it both gripping and touching and you'll laugh, cry, and get angry. Definitely a classic worth adding to your library!

Beautiful book!.......1998-04-10

Though they are simple and black and white, I found the photographs by Walker Evans to be fascinating. Cynthia Rylant's poetry adds depth to the photographs in this interesting look at the Depression era. I recommend this book.

Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future

Average customer rating:

OK but not great
Interesting but incomplete
Bush and GOP stole this election just like they did the last and look where our country's heading?
Feels incomplete
Adequate

Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future
Evan Thomas , Eleanor Clift , and Staff of Newsweek
Manufacturer: PublicAffairs
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1586482939
Release Date: 2005-01-04

Book Description

An extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the 2004 presidential election reported by Newsweek's premier political reporters, including bestselling biographer Evan Thomas.

A full year before the presidential election, four Newsweek reporters are detached from the magazine to work fulltime on getting inside the campaigns of the Republican and Democratic candidates. Because Newsweek promises not to reveal any information until after the votes are cast, the reporters receive highly unusual access. They travel with the candidates, live at their headquarters, befriend their staffs. They blend into the background, where they watch and listen.

Evan Thomas has been the writer for this project for the last three elections, and each time, he has brilliantly woven together an award-winning narrative of the campaign, based on the reporting of the Newsweek team. The goal is a rich narrative, a telling, human, and personal story of the extraordinary ordeal of running for the presidency. The characters are the candidates, their families, and their top advisers. They battle uncertainty, exhaustion, a hostile media, and each other in a high-stakes contest that can produce only one winner. The 2004 election promises to be drama of a high order, a close, tense, bitter struggle in a deeply divided country caught in a strange and hard war. Newsweek's reporters will be there at the critical moments, recording the scenes that will decide the outcome.

After the election, the Newsweek team will produce an expanded version of the stories that appeared in the magazine and Thomas will write an essay on the new administration, its key players and its prospects, the tone and direction it is expected to set. The book that emerges will be a first draft of history--not rough, but knowing and deeply reported.

Customer Reviews:

OK but not great.......2007-09-14

I love the backstage info and the reports about the personalities and interactions on the campaign staff. The Newsweek folks certainly saw a lot that was not reported at the time.

My biggest disappointment is that it did not live up to the billing in the title. The subtitle says "How BC04 won and what you can expect in the future." Well, whoever wrote the title forgot to tell the authors about the second half of that subtitle.

The only mention the future in the final chapter (a mere 12 pages) and even then it isn't really about Election 2008 (the title of the chapter), its more about how Bush and Kerry reacted after the election and how second term presidents generally screw up.

Is it slanted? Yes. As another reviewer (Marc Dalesandro 031505) said, they had good access to Kerry but Bush and Co. kept them at arms length. That same reviewer had some great examples of biased terms used in describing different people and events.

Besides his examples, the most obvious to me were in that same last chapter where, for example, in discussing what Bush _could_ do as a second term president the authors suggest he take on liberal answers to Social Security (raise retirement to 70 and raise taxes on "the rich").

Bottom line: good inside detail about some of the campaign machinations, liberal bias is there but not overwhelming, nonexistent information about what the future would be like.

Interesting but incomplete .......2006-04-14

I read this book in one night and found it to be very interesting. I did enjoy reading some of the behind the scenes stuff like John Kerry's tantrum in the back of the campaign limo when his personal assistant could not find his hair brush. However that had been in Newsweek before and as well as on Drudge's website. New inside information about the campaign is not really a quality aspect of this publication. Since I paid attention to the campaign this publication served more as a summary or a reminder of events.

Also Newsweek's publication seems to form a lot of bias opinions about why people voted the way they did, often citing minor campaign footnotes. There is virtually no information regarding the inner thoughts of the president, which I guess is not unusual considering lack of trust of the mainstream media and being a wartime president. The publication also brushes over important political divides and the importance of the war on terror.

If you are not deeply knowledgable of presidential campaigns this may be a good read for you. If you consider yourself more of an expert you might want to find a more complete or indepth account. The book is slightly liberal but overall fair. I think the authors made false claims about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth however. I feel the main reason Kerry is a loser is not because President Bush is so great, but he does have a determination and discipline to admire...The big reason is he never connected with the voters. For all of Kerry's strengths he is really an out of touch insider liberal elitist.

Bush and GOP stole this election just like they did the last and look where our country's heading?.......2005-11-28

Down the toilet. But don't worry. We got Howard Dean who ain't afraid to come to my state and others and help bring in real democracy to America rather than put up with Bush/Limbaughian rant of bringing fake democracy to Iraq while stealing elections here at home and doing everything they can to turn America into a corporate fascism.

Feels incomplete.......2005-09-11

Certainly the privileged access that Thomas and his team makes for an insightful account of the 2004 election, drawing back to the nomination process. Pity for Kerry's plight, a hint of disdain for Bush and his coterie, are peppered throughout the narrative. Throughout, a lot of very interesting inside information is revealed in the book as well. Ultimately, I walked away feeling that the election was more lost by Kerry than won by Bush. Kerry's situation is blamed on his indecisiveness, his lack of trust in his his team, his poor people management skills, and his wife's attitude. There is not as much of the inside-scoop on the BC04 side perhaps, from an emotional perspective, as Kerry. And while Howard Dean takes a beating by the authors, we learn very little about John Edwards, who may in fact be the nominee in 2008.
What was most disappointing is the fractured prose. There is nothing really holding the book together, except for the theme of the book itself. The structure is there but the information and opinions often feel disjointed. Events and reports are presented in chronological order, but there is no flow, and the authors tend to jump from one nugget to the next without any bridge. Once in a while, interesting sub-themes are left hanging and incomplete. Perhaps the publisher rushed the book to print or simply didn't recognize the value added of adding this important finishing touch. Other career reporters have assembled excellent books on presidental elections 2000, 1996, 1992 (see Roger Simon) and I feel that Thomas and his team could have done a lot better than just throwing together their reports and conclusions on E04.
In the end, I appreciated the book for its detail and information, but found it poorly pieced together, which detracted from my enjoying the experience as much as I would have liked.

Adequate.......2005-08-29

Election 2004, works as a good primer to one of the most important presidential campaigns in US history. Yet Newsweek did a less than fair job in its reporting from both camps.

E-04 could have used a bit more editorial help as well as a bias check; it doesn't flow very well and overlooks important things, ignoring some downright. I do think that the criticisms directed against Kerry were slanted; I was so un-happy with Newsweek's coverage that I actually dropped my subscription. It is no coincidence either that most of the books recommended in this website along with this one are favorable to the right. To be fair, this book does report on Kerry's own unfavorable response to Newsweek' coverage; a gesture of intellectual honesty Thomas should be given credit for.

More would have been appreciated about Kerry's ill-conceived campaign and lack of message and Rove's focused, dirty and eventually successful, tricks. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; an obvious re-visitation of veterans against McCain in 2000 don't get the right coverage. Neither does Kerry's refusal to go against Bush's personal attacks, and failure to address the plethora of Bush's mistakes in the last two months, which decidedly cost him the election. We get very little on these points from the book. In one of the mildly insightful moments, Thomas reports that the electorate had a hard-time distinguishing Kerry's position on the war from Bush's, and consequently voted for the more stable looking candidate. This I thought was a very accurate point.

As a pet peeve, I always bought the whole Kerry's "Come-Back Kid" attitude, I even heard some of his former opponents on the right praise him for it. This book debunks it, and informs us this was just a campaign myth his people were trying to promote, which looking back on, makes sense.

One of the conclusions in E-04 was that Kerry lost partly as a result of his comments on Mary Cheney on the third debate (this is suggested and not said outright). This is just not true; although Kerry's comment was un-called for and served no purpose (I winced when he said it), I don't think that so much of the electorate was so turned off by it that they ended up voting for Bush, who ran on an anti-gay marriage platform. How much sense does that make? This assessment shows a lack of touch with the real issues on the part of Newsweek. In the following weeks the Republican camp did a lot to discredit Kerry on this point, but it is not pointed out by E-04 that Alan Keyes, a conservative republican running for the senate seat against Obama in Illinois had called Mary Cheney a "selfish hedonist" and received nary a comment from the now -conveniently- outraged Cheneys. This should have been noted in the book. I don't need Newsweek to editorialize, but I do want perspective.

Then there's Ohio. Although I'm not one for conspiracy theories there was obvious foul play in the weeks preceding and on election day; from Secretary of State Blackwell's flip-flapping on voting regulations, to the Rove people calling people in strong democratic precincts by phone and advising them to vote at the wrong places, to the lack of a voting records paper trail. Yes, there are irregularities on every election, but when all the irregularities favor the same candidate, I get a bit skeptical. Alas, this subject seemed too controversial for Newsweek.

Newsweek's coverage fails for one of these counts; they were either so engrossed in the process of reporting that they overlooked what for them, and not the electorate, was obvious, or they got so close to the campaigns they were covering that their judgment was impaired. I felt I was better informed by other sources during the election.

Campaign 2004 is at best an ok primer and at worst, a slightly biased account in need of some editorial cohesion.

Average customer rating:

Walker Evans: Havana 1933
Gilles Mora
Manufacturer: Pantheon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Photo Essays | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Walker Evans: Cuba

ASIN: 0394574931
Release Date: 1989-10-25

Average customer rating:

Honors the legacy
Quite interesting.
Poignant and thought-provoking
A "Must Have" for Anyone who liked "Let Us Now Praise...."
Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction 1991

And Their Children after Them
Dale Maharidge
Manufacturer: Pantheon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Social History | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

Look Inside History Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South
Homeland
Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town
You Have Seen Their Faces
Doing Documentary Work (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities)

ASIN: 0394577663
Release Date: 1989-05-13

Customer Reviews:

Honors the legacy.......2007-01-31

For readers of the original Agee/Evans collaboration, "And Their Children" is well worth the time. The reporter and photographer tracked down the 116 living offspring of the pseudonymous Gudger, Ricketts, and Woods families, as well as those who were part of the original book (12 of 22 who appeared in "Let Us Now" were still alive when they began their research in 1986). Not all were willing to be interviewed or photographed, but many were.

As with the first book, the tale here is not a particularly happy one. The author begins by recounting the suicide of Maggie Louise Gudger, age 10 in 1936, a particular favorite of Agee's, and dead at age 45--the same age at which Agee himself died from drink. And yet there are varying degrees of hope in many of the stories, such as that of Maggie Louise's daughter Debbie and her children.

The structure of the book follows each family through different periods: 1936-1940; 1940-1960; and 1960-1986. The author also includes sections on one of the local landowning families (which was far from rich!) and an African-American sharecropping family. Along the way, we learn surprising things about the evil (and Faulknerian) Fred Ricketts, the fate of Clair Bell (she did not die at age 4, as Agee had feared she would), the struggles of George Gudger, and the families' views on Agee, Evans, and the original book. About the children and grandchildren, we find out about those who ran away (and usually came back) and those who stayed; marriages; children; the end of farming; attempts at succeeding at school and at work; closeness and bitterness. It's all grippingly told. And the photographs that allow one to compare the state of things in 1936 and 1986 are excellent. Several photos exactly re-capture the originals.

Quibbles: Naturally, I think, the sections on the two families who did not appear in the first book are less interesting. They could have been abbreviated. Also, the author's (negative) take on the state of America in 1986 is garden-variety journalism for that time. These sections are easily avoided, however, and do not detract from the writing about the original families.

Counter to the author's gloomy opinions, his stories indicate that many of these descendents of share-croppers emerged from the Depression to enjoy a slow but steady material progress. Maggie Louise's grandchildren, now in their thirties, should do even better over the course of their lives. One hopes that another writer-photographer team will venture to Hobe's Hill in 2036 to test that proposition.

Quite interesting........2005-07-25

While I have Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on deck to read as well, the friend who loaned me the books explained she found And Their Children After Them first, and actually liked reading them in reverse order. So, I chose to follow her lead.

The book, even standing alone, is an intensely personal and touching look into the lives of people who many of us who enjoy the luxury of writing reviews on the Internet can never really understand. The backgrounds, upbringings and challenges were so vastly different, and the book does a good job of showing us something different, something very real.

I can understand the retiscence of some to participate in the book -- while reading passages in this book I often thought to myself what it would feel like to be the person being written about and to see the things about them in print. Like our society, there is a great deal of judgement in the book -- while they try to avoid it, it is there, and it's painful at times.

But it's all worth it, in my opinion, to uncover the many thought provoking things that relate to our world today, and that give me a better understanding of history and people's place within it.

Poignant and thought-provoking.......2000-10-19

This book should be read right after reading James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Mem. Unfortuantely I read it over four years before I read Agee's work. When I read this book--in Feb 1996--I wrote to myself: This is a book Newt Gingrich and the crazy House freshmen should read--people who are so intent that those who cannot make it on their own should not make it.

A "Must Have" for Anyone who liked "Let Us Now Praise....".......1999-03-20

First introduced to "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" by James Agee and Walker Evans through a PBS Documentary, which inspired a dash to the library to read the book iteself, it wasn't until years later I went back to the library to see if anyone had ever followed up on the story. Confronted with the then new computerized "card catalog" system, I wondered how I might search for any related writings when it dawned on me what a perfect title would naturally evolve from the verse the first book title was taken: ..And Their Children After Them. Imagine my amazement when I tried that title, and there it was! Maharidge and Williamson have followed in Agee and Evans footsteps to give readers "the rest of the story" of the tenant farmers' families and grandchildren, as well as the stories of Agee and Evans themselves. I congratulation them on an excellent book, and offer thanks to the families and their descendants for sharing their lifestories. Their lives did not take the path predicted for them by Agee: life refuses to be harnessed by prediction. Some went farther than anyone could have anticipated, while others came to a place, if possible, even worse than expected. As a second generation American, descended from Polish and Prussian immigrants who lived comparable lives, but who were blessed to own their own land, I identified closely with these stories, from the first page of "Let Us Praise" to the last page of "And Their Children".

Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction 1991.......1997-05-02

Unfortunately, the synopsis left out that this book won the Pulitzer for Non-fiction in 1991. Maharidge and Williamson followed the footsteps of James Agee who had profiled sharecroppers during the Depression. They found their decendants, and showed that while cotton and sharecropping had died, rural poverty for these families had been passed down to new generations. The front section of the book is a series of photographs by Williamson, and they are tremendous. Moreover, in their reporting, they filled a gap left by Agee by finding a black family of sharecroppers to add to the others profiled. This is a tremendous book. It works on multiple levels, giving both the sweep of Southern social and economic history and bringing it down to individuals. Beyond that, the book is a metaphor for our own time. "If we understand the death of cotton," Maharidge writes in this book, "we understand many things about modern America." This is a tremendous work, highly readable and moving. The recognition these two craftsmen received for it is well-deserved

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