A Seventh Man
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
A Seventh Man Details
Review “I admire and love John Berger’s books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting—in contemporary English letters, he seems to be peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. He is a wonderful artist and thinker.”—Susan Sontag Read more About the Author Storyteller, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic, John Berger is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, Here Is Where We Meet, the Booker Prize-winning novel G, Hold Everything Dear, the Man Booker–longlisted From A to X, and A Seventh Man.Jean Mohr‘s longstanding collaboration with John Berger has produced five books, including A Seventh Man and A Fortunate Man. Among his other works are After the Last Sky (with Edward Said) and Side by Side or Face to Face. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland. Read more
Reviews
Re: The picture; that could have been me, age 21, right down to the fashionable flower shirt and the sideburns. In 1970 as a young American working to get by in Europe, often counting small change and living on stale rolls and a chunk of salami sauage, I rented a room in a rooming house in Ramstein. You got clean sheets twice a month, you had a sink and a wardrobe, a table with a couple of chairs. My neighbors in similar rooms were all gastarbeiters, mostly Turkish. We had a communal kitchen and what really counted, central heating in each room. The tenants were all well behaved very reticent and the woman who owned the complex let everybody know she had a gun. A huge shower room existed in the basement which I used heavily because outdoor mechanical work meant you could get cold down to your bones. Like in the book, I had to take the physical. Like in the book I traveled on German trains, often standing room only. It's a great book, but I think Berger's constant political filter and his dogmatic Marxism prevented him from seeing what was really going on. Still a very good book and great photographs.
