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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
While the actual writing is beautiful and the included pictures are interesting, nothing else about this book is worthwhile. Along with long tangential details, the author describes teenage girls and children in erotically charged ways. I would rather not worry that children in poverty were being groomed by the author, thanks.
GOSH GOSH OH James Agee's words here, so exhaustive, and Walker Evans's photos - just gasp. The beds and mantles and fields and bodies. The dust, too. The children here. It is all so precisely here at the same time as Agee asks these huge questions about art and life and existence. There were a few breaks wherein Agee describes how being on the road for so long documenting lives for the Farm Security Administration made him long for women and it made me feel a bitttttt iffy.
Something about the photographs and writing left an impression on me. It doesn't hurt that my English professor during this course was amazing, but Agee really makes the life of a sharecropper come alive with graceful prose.
This was rough going at first, very dense and seemingly repetitive in places, but I appreciated the style and some of his acknowledgements of the extremely fraught task which he had been set. There were passages I loved, and lots of things I found deeply disturbing, both about the realities of these people's lives and the way in which Agee reacted to and described them (he uses the word "sexy" in reference to an 8-year-old girl. EWW.) Ultimately, I found this definitely worth reading, especially as a Southerner, to understand another nuance of class and race relations in the 1930s South.
What I liked about it: The photographs are amazing, of course, as are the descriptions of the families' homes, possessions, meals, work, clothing and schools.
What I didn't like about it: First, the photographs are presented with no descriptions, so you have only a rough idea of which person is which. Second, while the authors spend dozens of pages exhaustively cataloging the contents of one family's living room, they devote almost no time to the families themselves. There is almost nothing in the way of character development or plot. We get no sense of how family dynamics work or how the families relate to their community or society at large. I definitely would have preferred to have some psychology and sociology mixed in with the static snapshot of their lives.
omnibrowbooks.blogspot.com
What I didn't like about it: First, the photographs are presented with no descriptions, so you have only a rough idea of which person is which. Second, while the authors spend dozens of pages exhaustively cataloging the contents of one family's living room, they devote almost no time to the families themselves. There is almost nothing in the way of character development or plot. We get no sense of how family dynamics work or how the families relate to their community or society at large. I definitely would have preferred to have some psychology and sociology mixed in with the static snapshot of their lives.
omnibrowbooks.blogspot.com
reflective
slow-paced
James Agee's work offers an interesting discussion of the work of a documentarian and the limitation of language in capturing the candid nuance of others' lives. Through this diligent and detailed book, Agee attempts to capture the poverty stricken lifestyle of sharecropper families in the Southern United States. This book, as he explains, is not designed for reader comfort, but to shed a light into the hardship and dirtiness that defines these people's lives.
Though I recognize the merit of this work, I think that it just ultimately wasn't for me. Though many of the descriptions Agee shared were filled with beautiful language (such as the glow of a light equated to "wounded honey"), many of the details were thorough to the point of being exhausting—capturing Agee's sentiments of the difficulties of describing something perfectly with words, but rendering the book tiring to read. Many of the sentences continued for multiple pages without end, and I struggled to understand his choices regarding these meandering thoughts and the haphazard punctuation included within them. Though perhaps this negates Agee's purpose, I think that this book could have been shorter, or perhaps he could have focused on fewer main ideas. The subject material was also something that I am personally not very interested in, which I think also detracted from my enjoyment of the book. For what he aims to do, Agee inarguably hits the mark, but the style and subject matter were not my particular cup of tea.
Though I recognize the merit of this work, I think that it just ultimately wasn't for me. Though many of the descriptions Agee shared were filled with beautiful language (such as the glow of a light equated to "wounded honey"), many of the details were thorough to the point of being exhausting—capturing Agee's sentiments of the difficulties of describing something perfectly with words, but rendering the book tiring to read. Many of the sentences continued for multiple pages without end, and I struggled to understand his choices regarding these meandering thoughts and the haphazard punctuation included within them. Though perhaps this negates Agee's purpose, I think that this book could have been shorter, or perhaps he could have focused on fewer main ideas. The subject material was also something that I am personally not very interested in, which I think also detracted from my enjoyment of the book. For what he aims to do, Agee inarguably hits the mark, but the style and subject matter were not my particular cup of tea.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
My rating: 4.25 stars
Long after I have forgotten how I spent my days scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, I will remember this book. How the heartbreak of unending work that leads nowhere leaves the lives of men and women in ruin, without even a shred of hope. Meanness and anger and sadness in its wake. A treatise on art, on poverty, on life – this book will shake you to your core.
But I would be remiss if I did not mention the subject of race relations. It is unfathomable to my educated eyes how poor Southern whites have continued to decry their black brethren when they have so much more in common than they have in difference. It’s the American dupe of the century, or even centuries.
And maybe the ultimate sadness, the pity I cannot see beyond, is that the words being used to savage human beings, robbing people of their dignity simply because they are poor, words being used more than 80 years ago, are the very same ones being used today. How my friends, do we move beyond? How do we restore dignity to those whose dignity has been stolen, generation after generation?
Long after I have forgotten how I spent my days scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, I will remember this book. How the heartbreak of unending work that leads nowhere leaves the lives of men and women in ruin, without even a shred of hope. Meanness and anger and sadness in its wake. A treatise on art, on poverty, on life – this book will shake you to your core.
But I would be remiss if I did not mention the subject of race relations. It is unfathomable to my educated eyes how poor Southern whites have continued to decry their black brethren when they have so much more in common than they have in difference. It’s the American dupe of the century, or even centuries.
And maybe the ultimate sadness, the pity I cannot see beyond, is that the words being used to savage human beings, robbing people of their dignity simply because they are poor, words being used more than 80 years ago, are the very same ones being used today. How my friends, do we move beyond? How do we restore dignity to those whose dignity has been stolen, generation after generation?