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	Pantheon Books Dec 2001, hc $35.00

Selected Essays
by John Berger

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

On the occasion of Berger's seventy-fifth birthday, this collection acknowledges and honors the rich variety of his ideas and concerns. It does not simply show how Berger's views have changed or how his thought has evolved; it can also be seen as a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time, as seen through the prism of art.

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books include the Booker Prize-winning novel G. and, more recently, To the Wedding and King. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, and Ways of Seeing. Berger lives in a small village in the French Alps.

art criticism/literary essays