Berger, John 1926- (John Peter Berger)

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Berger, John 1926- (John Peter Berger)

PERSONAL:

Born November 5, 1926, in London, England; son of S.J.D. and Miriam Berger; divorced; children: two sons and one daughter. Education: Attended Central School of Art and Chelsea School of Art, London, England. Politics: Marxist.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Quincy, Mieussy, 74440 Taninges, France. Agent—Anna Arthur PR, The Ground Floor, 3 Charlotte Mews, London W1T 4DZ, England.

CAREER:

Writer, editor, translator, painter, art critic, art historian, actor, and educator. Painter and teacher of drawing; actor in films, including Walk Me Home. Exhibitions: Has exhibited work at the Wildenstein, Redfern, and Leicester Galleries, London, England. Military service: British Army, 1944-46, served in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Infantry.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Booker Prize, 1972, and James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1973, both for G; New York Critics Prize for the Best Scenario of the Year, 1976, for Jonah Who Will Be Twenty-five in the Year 2000; Prize for Best Reportage, Union of Journalists and Writers, Paris, 1977, for A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

A Painter of Our Time, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1958, expanded edition, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1989.

The Foot of Clive, Methuen (London, England), 1962.

Corker's Freedom, Methuen (London, England), 1964.

G, Viking (New York, NY), 1972.

Pig Earth (part one of trilogy; also see below), Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative (London, England), 1979, Vintage (New York, NY), 1992.

Once in Europa (part two of trilogy; also see below), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1987.

Lilac and Flag: An Old Wives' Tale of a City (part three of trilogy; also see below), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1990.

Into Their Labours (trilogy; contains Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag: An Old Wives' Tale of a City), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1991.

To the Wedding: A Novel, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1995.

(With Nella Bielski) Isabelle: A Story in Shots, Dufour (Chester Springs, PA), 1998.

(With Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke) I Could Read the Sky, Harvill Press (London, England), 1998.

King: A Street Story, Random House (New York, NY), 1999.

(With Nella Bielski) Oranges for the Son of Alexander Levy/Isabelle, Arcadia Books Ltd. (London, England), 2001.

Here Is Where We Meet, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2005.

NONFICTION

Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing, Methuen (London, England), 1960, published as Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing, Knopf (New York, NY), 1962.

The Success and Failure of Picasso, Penguin (London, England), 1965, Vintage (New York, NY), 1993.

A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, photographs by Jean Mohr, Holt (New York, NY), 1967.

Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R., Pantheon (New York, NY), 1969.

The Moment of Cubism, and Other Essays, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1969.

Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things, edited by Nikos Stangos, Penguin (London, England), 1972, published as The Look of Things: Essays, Viking (New York, NY), 1974.

Ways of Seeing (based on a television series), Penguin (London, England), 1972, Viking (New York, NY), 1973.

A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe, photographs by Jean Mohr, Penguin (London, England), 1975, published as A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe, Viking (New York, NY), 1975.

About Looking (essays), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1980.

Une autre facon de raconter, photographs by Jean Mohr, F. Maspero (Paris, France), 1981, published as Another Way of Telling, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1982.

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1984.

The Sense of Sight: Writings (essays), edited by Lloyd Spencer, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1985, published as The White Bird: Writings, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1985.

Keeping a Rendezvous (essays), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1991.

Photocopies, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1995.

Titian: Nymph and Shepherd, Te Neues Publishing (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Jean Mohr) At the Edge of the World, Reaktion (London, England), 1999.

Selected Essays, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2001.

The Shape of a Pocket (essays), Pantheon (New York, NY), 2001.

(With Michael Hofmann and Christopher Lloyd) Arturo di Stefano, Merrell (London, England), 2002.

TRANSLATOR

Wolfgang Martini, Renato Guttuso, Verlag der Kunst (Dresden, Germany), 1957.

(With Anya Bostock) Bertolt Brecht, Poems on the Theatre, Scorpion (Buckhurst, England), 1961, published as The Great Art of Living Together: Poems on the Theatre, Granville Press (London, England), 1972.

(With Anya Bostock) Bertolt Brecht, Helene Weigel, Actress, Veb Edition (Leipzig, Germany), 1961.

(With Anya Bostock) Aime Cesaire, Return to My Native Land, Penguin (London, England), 1969.

(With Jonathan Steffen) Nella Bielski, After Arkadia, Penguin (London, England), 1992.

(With Lisa Appignanesi) Nella Bielski, The Year Is '42, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2004.

SCREENPLAYS

Marcel Frishman, New Yorker Films (New York, NY), 1958.

City at Chandigarh (documentary), New Yorker Films (New York, NY), 1966.

(With Alain Tanner) La Salamandre (title means "The Salamander"), New Yorker Films (New York, NY), 1971.

(With Alain Tanner) Le Metier du Monde (title means "The Middle of the World"), New Yorker Films (New York, NY), 1974.

(With Alain Tanner) Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000, translation by Michael Palmer, published as Jonah Who Will Be Twenty-five in the Year 2000, North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, CA), 1983.

Also author, with Timothy Neat, of Play Me Something.

OTHER

Poems in Voix, Maspero (Paris, France), 1977.

(With Nella Bielski) Question de geographie (play; produced at Theatre National de Marseille, 1984), J. Laffitte (Marseilles, France), 1984, published as A Question of Geography, Faber (London, England), 1987.

(With Nella Bielski) Le dernier portrait de Francisco Goya: le peintre joue aujourd'hui (play), Champ Vallon (Seyssel, France), 1989.

Géo Chavez: der erste Flug ueber die Alpen = Géo Chavez: The First Flight Across the Alps, idee und gestaltung by Heidi und Peter Wenger, Rotten (Visp, Switzerland), 2001.

Contributor to books, including Artists and Writers: Ways of Seeing Art in Small Countries, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (Dundee, Scotland), 1981; and About Time (based on a television series directed by Michael Dibb and Christopher Rawlence), edited by Rawlence, J. Cape, Channel 4 Television Co. (London, England), 1985. Author of introduction, Prison Paintings, by Michael Quanne, J. Murray (London, England), 1985; and Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, by David Levi Strauss, Aperture (New York, NY), 2003. Also contributor to periodicals, including Nation and New Statesman.

SIDELIGHTS:

"John Berger is perhaps the most challenging British writer of his generation," declared a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor. Berger, known primarily as an author of art criticism and fiction, is also a poet, essayist, translator, playwright and screenwriter. The Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor further commented that Berger's "writings in a wide variety of genres and his way of life have constituted a distinctive artistic statement." Assessing the writer's achievements in a New York Times Book Review piece, Robert Boyers proclaimed that in all his work, Berger has shown "great vividness of imagination and extraordinary clarity of intention." Boyers went on to write: "To read Mr. Berger over the last 30 years has been to feel oneself in the presence of an intelligence utterly unmoved by literary or political fashion and unfailingly committed to its own clear vision of what is decent and important, in art and in life."

Berger began his working life as an artist and teacher, exhibiting his work at galleries in London, including Wildenstein, Redfern, and Leichester. During this period, he also served as art critic for such prominent periodicals as New Statesman, New Society, Punch and the Sunday Times. Some of his early essays were collected and published in Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing, the title of which reflects the author's dedication to Marxist philosophies. According to a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor, Berger's criticism is unique in that it avoids "the given historical categories of art criticism in favor of an existential engagement with the historical moment of the artist and the work of art." Berger's interest in the relationship between art and politics is further illustrated in The Moment of Cubism, and Other Essays. Berger contends that the revolutionary art form of cubism presaged the political and economic revolution in Russia. The "moment of cubism," according to Berger, was that brief period in which artists reached an understanding of the changes occurring in the outside world and reflected this understanding in their paintings. Adapted from a 1972 television series, his Ways of Seeing has become regarded as something of a modern masterpiece on art appreciation and is a perennial favorite for introduction to art classes.

Berger's nonfiction began to take on a more mixed-media appearance, including essays, criticism, poetry, and prose commentary. In 1982 he collaborated with photographer Jean Mohr (and was aided by Nicholas Philibert) on Une autre facon de raconter, which was also published as Another Way of Telling. Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times Book Review called Another Way of Telling the "most original photography book to appear in recent months." Edward W. Said in the Nation argued that the photographs are "extraordinary both as pictures and as accompaniment to the text." Said commented that the book's basic premise is "an argument against linear sequence—that is, sequence construed by Berger as the symbol of dehumanizing political processes … engaged in the extinction of privacy, subjectivity, free choice." A Newsweek contributor noted that Another Way of Telling would "certainly be widely read and hotly debated."

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, noted Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times Book Review, is "a series of prose meditations and poems on themes of loss and love, both individual and historical." Containing some passages of art criticism as well, And Our Faces reflects the eclectic nature of Berger's work. "Modern history, as Berger sees it, no longer guarantees the present's incorporation into the past, but hastens the present towards a future which never comes," argued Observer contributor Peter Conrad. For Conrad, Berger's "reflection on the twin determinants of our fate, time and space" is "high-minded rather than inspired," but also "noble and moving." Michael Ignatieff in the Times Literary Supplement noted that "Time and Death are grand and risky themes," but concluded that And Our Faces is "among the most finished of Berger's works because it is the most serene, the one least troubled by the impulse to instruct or convert."

As his career progressed, Berger's essays drifted away from pure art criticism and became increasingly involved with the processes of seeing and thinking. In The Sense of Sight: Writings, for example, he includes his impressions of some of the world's great cities, peasant art, and the work of such artists as Goya, Rembrandt, and Amedeo Modigliani. Reviewing the book in Time, Otto Friedrich called it the work of "a resourceful mind passionately at work." He praised Berger for his "vivid prose" and his avoidance of "windy academic generalities." Friedrich summarized: "He not only sees more than most people do but seizes what he sees, twisting and probing until it yields up its meaning."

Berger's 1991 collection Keeping a Rendezvous includes essays, poems and meditations, most of which concern visual art. But as John Barrell noted in the London Review of Books, "none of them is about art alone: they place the paintings, the sculptures, the films, the photographs they discuss in the context of geography, sexuality, the nature of time, the rise of multinationals, the collapse of totalitarian Communism." Barrell argued that Berger values the visual arts "for their ability, as he believes, to put us in touch with the pre-verbal" but concluded that the author is not clear upon how this is accomplished or why "that should be a particularly good thing for art to do." Times Literary Supplement contributor Roger Moss commented that Keeping a Rendezvous, like Into Their Labours, is "a consistent meditation on what might save us, on the possibility of paradise. This alone makes them a welcome antidote to the infectious cynicism that has come to characterize so much English left-wing writing." Geoff Dyer in Guardian Weekly noted that, although "Berger's answers are becoming increasingly spiritual, they are still rooted in a visceral sense of the needs and hopes of the oppressed." Dyer added: "It is exactly this recognition and quality that gives Berger's own books their gravity and grace."

Berger's Photocopies, which was published in 1996, is a collection of vignettes drawn from memorable moments in his life over the past several decades. Hailed as a work "that brings nonfiction writing close to drawing" by New Statesman contributor Michele Roberts, Photocopies contains ephemeral moments, remembered fragments of larger incidents. Many of these short vignettes involve meetings with Berger's neighbors from the village of Haute-Savoie, people now long since dead but "intensely alive a second time in Berger's memory, and immortalised in his crisp, terse, completely unsentimental prose," according to Roberts. "Each is a ‘verbal photocopy,’" explained Amy Edith Johnson in the New York Times Book Review. "Neither life nor art, these impressions embody a wish that—as in the frugal, meticulous lives of Mr. Berger's rural neighbors in the French Alps—nothing should be lost or wasted." While noting that not all of the vignettes are successful, Johnson praised the volume as a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction: "Mr. Berger's artists, peasants, revolutionaries are united … in the human economy they share, [where] no labor is spared and all is worthy."

In 2001 two works rounding out Berger's nonfiction oeuvre were published: The Shape of a Pocket and Selected Essays. The former title is a collection of essays, many of which have been published in foreign language publications. The twenty-four pieces collected in The Shape of a Pocket deal with artists from Rembrandt to Degas to Frieda Kahlo. Referring to these, a critic writing for Kirkus Reviews noted that "in his essays on great artists, Berger always offers up something like an epiphany." Additionally, a large chunk of the book is taken up with a dialogue with Mexico's Subcomandante Marcos, and there are also "familiar barnyard observations from Berger as the rural dweller in the French Alps," according to a Publishers Weekly contributor, who added that "most of the present book, integrating the author's own aging and physical decay, rings as true as the rest of his much-appreciated work." Kenneth Baker, reviewing The Shape of a Pocket in the San Francisco Chronicle, praised in particular "an ingenious piece about Hieronymus Bosch as a prophetic artist," as well as the "pleasant surprise" of a 1996 radio piece, "Will It Be a Likeness?," the "most puzzling and involving thing Berger has published in years."

Berger's Selected Essays, on the other hand, gathers the work of decades, including pieces from earlier collections of essays which allow the reader "to trace the arc of Berger's writing toward ever more direct expressions of the ways historical circumstances shape and color individual experience," according to Baker. The same reviewer also commented that Selected Essays "makes a wonderful introduction to Berger's critical work," reprinting outstanding essays on Picasso, Goya, and Turner, among others. Baker commented: "Even if Berger had never written stirring fiction and first-hand accounts of people living out their fates in such books as A Fortunate Man and A Seventh Man, the Selected Essays would establish him as an indispensable late 20th century voice." A critic for Publishers Weekly, also reviewing Selected Essays, commented that "in the tradition of energetic British eccentrics, Berger has contributed much to writing on modern art, often speak- ing sense and doing it more entertainingly than most salaried newspaper specialists."

Berger's fiction has also attracted a great deal of critical attention and debate. Corker's Freedom, his 1964 novel, was praised in England upon its initial publication. When released in the United States nearly twenty years later, it was again acclaimed as a "contemporary masterwork," in the words of Douglas Glover, contributor to the Washington Post Book World. Corker's Freedom describes one day in the life of a sixty-four-year-old man who decides to strike out on his own, leaving the home he has shared for years with his invalid sister. This adventure, the greatest ever to occur in the man's life, quickly comes to a miserable end. Glover called Corker's Freedom "an exhilarating achievement, wise, unsettling, and alive with a sense of humanity that is flawed, doomed, yet oddly indomitable." Joyce Reiser Kornblatt, in a retrospective review of Corker's Freedom in the New York Times Book Review, referred to the book as "a valuable antecedent to the greater novels that followed it," and concluded that Berger is "one of the most intelligent writers alive."

Berger followed Corker's Freedom with G—the tale of a modern Don Juan, presented in what Gerald Marzorati described in the New York Times Magazine as a "brilliant, late-modernist" style. Berger's fascination with the impact that social structures have on the individual is reflected in the character G, the protagonist of the novel, who is essentially apolitical though profoundly affected by the historical events of his time. Duncan Fallowell in Books and Bookmen called G "terribly good" and also "terribly pretentious." Fallowell concluded that Berger's "undoubted power to move the reader is too frequently undersold by the author himself." Leo Baudy in the New York Times Book Review argued that G "belongs to that other tradition of the novel, the tradition of George Eliot, [Leo] Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, the tradition of fallible wisdom, rich, nagging and unfinished. To read [G] is to find again a rich commitment to the resources and possibilities of the genre." Arnold Kettle in the New Republic commented that although G "isn't an easy book to deal with," it is a "fine, humane and challenging book." Though not embraced by all critics, G nevertheless won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1972 and secured Berger's reputation as a novelist of the first order.

In the early 1970s Berger moved to the Giffre River valley in France to make his home in a peasant village, where he began work on what some commentators consider his greatest work, the trilogy Into Their Labours. In the first volume of this trilogy, Pig Earth, Berger created a portrait of the ancient lifestyle of the French peasant class. "Fiction or anthropology? The publisher's catalogue heading lists both, but it is difficult to categorize this rich melange of story, fable, and social document—with poems interspersed between the chapters," reported William Wiser in the New York Times Book Review. Wiser noted that as Berger "faithfully records the seasons of the pig earth and searches for the French peasant in himself, he reveals something elemental in us all." A Washington Post Book World contributor claimed that Berger "evokes with remarkable economy a peasant world as resilient to history, as sensual and as unpredictable as the village of Macondo built so lavishly by [Gabriel] Garcia Marquez."

Once in Europa, the second part of Berger's Into Their Labours trilogy, shows the intrusion of the modern world into the old ways, and the swift crumbling of centuries-old traditions that follows. Progressive reviewer Saul Landau found the stories "beautiful and painful" and credited Berger with painting "the characters and landscapes like a Goya with words, conjuring up horrifying yet real images of devastating change." Richard Critchfield in the New York Times Book Review argued that a "sense of loss—both of loved people and a whole way of life … haunts this second volume" of Berger's trilogy. Critchfield hoped Berger would gain a wider readership in America with this volume, and called him "one of the most gifted and imaginative [of] contemporary writers."

In Lilac and Flag: An Old Wives' Tale of a City, the author focuses on the final degradation of the village people who have attempted to start new lives in the city. This culminating novel of Berger's trilogy received mixed reviews. Guy Mannes-Abbott in the New Statesman argued that throughout the trilogy, "the stories get longer as they approach the challenge of the modern, until they fracture into the complexity of [Lilac and Flag]." Mannes-Abbott commented that the "simple, but not simplistic, life [Berger] records slides into idealisation," but concluded that Lilac and Flag is "a unique piece of fiction." Robert Boyers in the New York Times Book Review noted that although Berger's "characteristic eye for telling physical detail and his feeling for the poetry of everyday life" are evident in Lilac and Flag, the book is burdened by its "fragmentariness and dreaminess." Boyers concluded: "One wonders how a writer of his experience and sophistication can have gone so wrong."

To the Wedding: A Novel, Berger's 1995 work, depicts two young lovers whose relationship continues even after the woman, Ninon, reveals that she is HIV-positive. The story culminates with the couple's wedding. A writer for Kirkus Reviews commented: "While the tragedy of AIDS has spawned many poignant works in the last decade, few have achieved the level of emotional, psychological, and physical harmony found here." Donna Seaman in Booklist noted that Berger avoids "melodrama and overanalysis … [and] has gone straight to the heart of the matter." Joanna M. Burkhardt in Library Journal wrote that royalties from To the Wedding will be donated to aid those with HIV and AIDS, and called the novel "bittersweet."

In his 1999 novel, King: A Street Story, Berger turns the convention of the animal story on its head. Whereas most such tales tell of man's cruelties to the beasts of the world, Berger's tells of cruelty to humans. Using the voice of a dog, the "King" of the title, the author spins a story of homelessness. King's masters are Vico and Vica, old people who live rough in temporary shelters near the coast on a stretch of land called Saint Valery. King is able to talk with all the people of this homeless community, "stray dogs," as Booklist reviewer Ray Olson describes them, seen thus in the eyes of those with their own homes. The book chronicles one day in the life of these poor people, one that ends with their violent eviction by police and bulldozers. Writing in the New York Times, Brigitte Frase noted that Berger "has been paring down his style." With King, Frase felt the author was "sparer than ever, and less successful" than in novels such a To The Wedding. Frase also complained that it is "just too hard to believe in a poetic dog." Other reviewers sharply differed from this judgment, however. Olson called Berger a "brilliant, experimental fiction writer" whose King "immerses readers so artfully, beautifully, and humanely in the experiences of homelessness." A Publishers Weekly contributor noted the difficulty of Berger's task in telling a "serious story" in the voice of a dog, but felt that the author "accomplished an impressive technical feat" by bringing the reader "so believably inside the head of an animal to elucidate the vagaries of human nature." Chris Searle, writing in Race and Class, thought that Berger "has pitched his own bivouac of truth and written a profound novel of our times." Searle also noted that "prophetic and teeming with insight about our times, King is an epochal novel."

Berger's eclectic approach has led some reviewers to consider him a difficult, albeit intelligent and original, author. Summarizing Berger's career, Edward W. Said in Nation wrote: "Berger is not easy to digest partly because he has a great deal to say in his stream of essays, books of criticism, film scripts and novels, and partly because he says it in unusual ways." Said added: "His knowledge of art history, philosophy and literature, like his acute political sense, is sophisticated without being heavy or obtrusive. The best thing about him, though, is his relentless striving for accessible truths about the visual arts—their ambiguity, memorial enchainments, half-conscious projections and irreducibly subjective force."

A Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor noted that the "lasting value of his work consists precisely in the intellectual restlessness that makes it necessary for him to cross frontiers between established cultural and social institutions in his pursuit of a synthetic critique of contemporary civilization." Paul Bonaventura concluded in a New Statesman interview with the author with the following summation: "At its best, Berger's work has changed the way we think about the world, about creativity and intellectual reach and what the linkages might be between them. In his fiction and nonfiction, Berger has irrevocably transformed the relationship between reader and subject."

An octogenarian in 2006, Berger continued to write. In his collection titled Here Is Where We Meet, the author presents a book that crosses genres, from autobiographical fiction to nonfiction. He writes about his journeys, including times spent in Lisbon, Geneva, Krakow, Madrid, and London. On one trip he talks with his dead mother while shopping, just one of many people out of Berger's past that reappear in his mind during his travels. In another vignette, Berger comes across Cro-Magnons in a cave in Chauvet, France, known for its ancient rock paintings. The author also writes about the living, and presents a touching story about an old friend taking his wife home to meet his family in Poland. In a review of Here Is Where We Meet in Publishers Weekly, a contributor noted that it may become difficult to tell who is real and who exists only in Berger's imagination. The reviewer also wrote: "With its clarity and beautifully proportioned contours of fictive memory, this book makes the perfect site to encounter Berger." A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that the author "has the appropriate historical consciousness and breadth of vision" to write about all of Europe. John Leonard, writing in Harper's, referred to Here Is Where We Meet as a "hybrid of breviary, consecration, and ancestor worship." Leonard went on to call the book "quite brilliant."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2, 1974, Volume 19, 1981.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, 1983, Volume 207: British Novelists since 1960, Third Series, 1999, pp. 34-44.

Dyer, Geoff, Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger, Pluto Press (London, England), 1986.

Modern British Literature, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Papastergiadis, Nikos, Modernity as Exile: The Stranger in John Berger's Writing, Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 1993.

Weibel, Paul, Reconstructing the Past: G and The White Hotel, Two Contemporary "Historical" Novels, P. Lang (Bern, Switzerland), 1989.

PERIODICALS

Book, January-February, 2002, Sean McCann, review of The Shape of a Pocket, p. 65.

Booklist, May 1, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of To the Wedding: A Novel; May 1, 1999, Ray Olson, review of King: A Street Story, p. 1576.

Books and Bookmen, September, 1972, Duncan Fallowell, review of G.

Guardian Weekly, February 16, 1992, Geoff Dyer, review of Keeping a Rendezvous.

Harper's, August 2005, John Leonard, review of Here Is Where We Meet, p. 81.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1993; March 1, 1995, review of To the Wedding, pp. 246-247; July 1, 1996, p. 913; November 15, 2001, review of The Shape of a Pocket, p. 1589; May 15, 2005, review of Here Is Where We Meet, p. 554.

Library Journal, October 1, 1993; May 1, 1995, Joanna M. Burkhardt, review of To the Wedding; December 1, 2004, Edward Cone, review of The Year Is '42, p. 97.

London Observer, April 3, 2005, Sean O'Hagan, "A Radical Returns," profile of author.

London Review of Books, April 9, 1992, John Barrell, review of Keeping a Rendezvous, p. 3.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 13, 1983, Suzanne Muchnic, review of Another Way of Telling, p. 6.

Nation, December 4, 1982, Edward W. Said, review of Another Way of Telling, pp. 595-597.

New Republic, October 7, 1972, Arnold Kettle, review of G, p. 31.

New Statesman, February 1, 1991, Guy Mannes-Abbott, review of Lilac and Flag: An Old Wives' Tale of a City, p. 36; June 28, 1996, Michele Roberts, review of Photocopies, pp. 47-48; November 12, 2001, Paul Bonaventura, "Master of Diversity," p. 38.

Newsweek, September 6, 1982, review of Another Way of Telling, pp. 76-77.

New York Times, June 13, 1999, Brigitte Frase, review of King, section 7, p. 21; January 13, 2002, David Thomson, "What Are You Looking At?," section 7, p. 16.

New York Times Book Review, September 10, 1972, Leo Baudy, review of G, pp. 5, 18; September 21, 1980, William Wiser, review of Pig Earth, pp. 14, 39; May 13, 1984, Peter Schjeldahl, review of And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, p. 18; April 5, 1987, Richard Critchfield, review of Once in Europa, pp. 9-10; August 19, 1990, Robert Boyers, review of Lilac and Flag, p. 20; December 20, 1992; January 6, 1993; November 7, 1993, Joyce Reiser Kornblatt, review of Corker's Freedom, p. 15; April 14, 1996, Amy Edith Johnson, review of Photocopies, p. 32; June 13, 1999, review of King, p. 21; January 20, 2002, review of Selected Essays, p. 18.

New York Times Magazine, November 29, 1987, Gerald Marzorati, review of G, pp. 39, 46, 50, 54.

Observer (London, England), December 16, 1984, Peter Conrad, review of And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, p. 19.

Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, June, 2002, Ana Honigman, review of The Shape of a Pocket, p. 134.

Progressive, June, 1988, Saul Landau, review of Once in Europa, pp. 30-31.

Publishers Weekly, March 15, 1999, review of King, p. 45; October 29, 2001, reviews of Selected Essays and The Shape of a Pocket, pp. 45-47; October 4, 2004, review of The Year Is '42, p. 66; July 11, 2005, review of Here Is Where We Meet, p. 62.

Race and Class, January-March, 2000, Chris Searle, review of King, p. 101.

San Francisco Chronicle, January 6, 2002, Kenneth Baker, "Berger's Pockets of Resistance," p. 2.

Time, July 21, 1986, Otto Friedrich, review of The Sense of Sight, p. 73.

Times Literary Supplement, January 4, 1985, Michael Ignatieff, review of And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, p. 7; May 22, 1992, Roger Moss, review of Keeping a Rendezvous; September 29, 1995, p. 24; February 12, 1999, review of King, p. 23.

Washington Post, February 10, 2002, "Dissenting Views," p. T13.

Washington Post Book World, October 12, 1980, review of Pig Earth, p. 7; February 27, 1994, Douglas Glover, review of Corker's Freedom, p. 6.