The Sense of Sight

Collected here for the first time in book form are essays, poetry, travel sketches and reminiscences, most published previously in magazines, by British art critic and novelist Berger (Ways of Seeing and G), a Marxist who has long explored the uneasy relationship between social conscience and aesthetics. Sharp, challenging and absorbing, Berger writes of painters from Durer to van Gogh, from Monet to Modigliani. He considers the art of storytelling, tells of drawing his father's face in death, discusses the Russian poet Mayakovsky's suicide, considers the difference between ""peasant'' and ``bourgeois'' meals. From his travels: ``Manhattan is peopled by people resigned to being betrayed daily by their own hopes. From this comes their incomparable wit, their cynicism and what is taken to be their realism.'' This book forces readers to look at their surroundings in a new way. January