Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 11, 2008 - Social Science - 160 pages

From a Booker Prize-winning author and one of the most impassioned of writers of our time, this powerful collection of essays offers a stark portrait of post-9/11 realities. John Berger occupies a unique position in the international cultural landscape: artist, filmmaker, poet, philosopher, novelist, and essayist, he is also a deeply thoughtful political activist. In Hold Everything Dear, his artistry and activism meld in an attempt to make sense of the current state of our world.

 

Berger analyzes the nature of terrorism and the profound despair that gives rise to it. He writes about the homelessness of millions who have been forced by poverty and war to live as refugees. He discusses Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Serbia, Bosnia, China, Indonesia-anyplace where people are deprived of the most basic of freedoms. Berger powerfully acknowledges the depth of suffering around the world and suggests actions that might finally help bring it to an end.

 

Contents

Wanting
7
Undefeated Despair
13
Would Softly Tell My Love
27
Where Are
41
War Against Terrorism or a Terrorist War?
49
Let Us Think About Fear
55
The Chorus in Our Heads or Pier Paolo Pasolini
83
A Master of Pitilessness?
91
Ten Dispatches About Endurance
97
Flesh and Speeches
107
About Disconnecting
113
Ten Dispatches About Place
119
Another Side of Desire
129
Notes
147
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About the author (2008)

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and lived in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.

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