|
|
Genealogy Book Store > Genealogy books beginning with L
|
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South |
Author: James Agee
Published: 2001-08-14 |
List price: $18.00
Our price: $12.24
|
Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: January 06th, 2009 07:27:25 AM
|
|
|
Customer comments on this selection.
 A timeless classic...
James Agee's painstaking and honest masterpiece is an exercise in empathy. It is a beautiful, tortured writing that speaks to both the deplorable conditions of the Depression-era souther sharecropper and the humanity of trying to present them in a favorable light.
Agee's writing style is at times erratic-- which helps to give the book its character. It is often self-doubting, as Agee calls himself a spy and frequently second guesses his role in accurately reporting the families' lives. Beautifully done and a groundbreaking classic in ethnographic fieldwork-- a must read!
 If nothing else, certainly brilliant and thought-provoking
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.
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.
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
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.
|
Similar Listings
|
|
Our Genealogy book picks:
|
|
Search the Genealogy Products Store
LCS Amazon Store 2.5 © 2009
|
|
|
