The selected essays of John Berger

John Berger’s diverse achievements as a writer are widely recognised. As well as plays, novels, short stories and poetry, he has always written essays, expressing more than forty years of tireless intellectual enquiry and fierce political engagement. Polemical, meditative, radical, always original (‘The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art’) Berger’s essays are also extremely wide-ranging. Photographers, artists, thinkers and peasants, zoos, museums and cities he has travelled to are among his subjects, sometimes within the space of a single essay.

The occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in November 2001 provides the opportunity to pay tribute to the rich variety of Berger’s ideas and concerns. Viewed chronologically, this collection does not simply show how his views have changed or his thought has evolved, it has also been seen as a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time as seen through the prism of art.

The central concerns that have underpinned all Berger’s writing are the enduring mystery of great art and the lived experience of the oppressed, preoccupations that are simply demonstrated here in Geoff Dyer’s thoughtful selection from Permanent Red, The Moment of Cubism, The Look of Things, About Looking, The White Bird and Keeping a Rendezvous. If you have never read John Berger before, then this book is a good place to start.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Selected-Essays-John-Berger/dp/0747554196