Selected Product:
| Wisconsin Death Trip (Wisconsin)
Paperback
Author: Michael Lesy
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Release Date: 2000-01-01
ISBN-10: 0826321933
ISBN-13: 9780826321930
List Price: $34.95
Average Customer Rating:
 | |
The Florida Keys: A History & Guide Tenth Edition (Florida Keys)
ISBN-10: 0812968425
ISBN-13: 9780812968422
List Price:$15.95
Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties
ISBN-10: 0393330591
ISBN-13: 9780393330595
List Price:$15.95
Hotel Theory
ISBN-10: 1933368691
ISBN-13: 9781933368696
List Price:$16.00
A Morning's Work: Medical Photographs from the Burns Archive & Collection, 1843-1939
ISBN-10: 0944092454
ISBN-13: 9780944092453
List Price:$60.00
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for Wisconsin Death Trip (Wisconsin) by Michael Lesy (ISBN-10: 0826321933, ISBN-13: 9780826321930).
At this time we have not yet written a review for Wisconsin Death Trip (Wisconsin) by Michael Lesy (ISBN-10: 0826321933, ISBN-13: 9780826321930). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.
Moving, effective, original, singular
| Customer Rating: | Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, originally a doctoral thesis, is one of the most touching, poetic, beautiful, harrowing, moving and dislocating works I have read. Basically a compendium of found glass plate negative photos taken by the (himself knock-knees odd) Charles Vam Schaik in and around the rural community of Black River Falls WI, and leavened by snippets taken from the Badger State Banner newspaper and the Mendota State Record Book (an insane asylum), as well as a few personal reminisces, the book instead is a commentary and an indictment of a brutal time of economic dislocation, social upheaval, religious confusion and obsession, and personal decay in a farming community. It is an endless repitition of suicide, madness, arson, children dying of disease, and of a mostly sternly religious people living the grimmest of lives of back breaking work in the country. The photos by their sheer repetition and some of the games played with them by the author, pound out a tattoo of strain, people only barely suppressing their madness, and a society truly on the edge of collapse. Hardly the bucolic paradise so often evoked in our time.
The afterword by the author provides some backstory and statistics backing the point up, and illustrating in numbers and facts what the pictures and excerpts made clear by anecdote, and is also well written.
This was something of a cult book in the mid 70s, a most unusual way of looking at local history, lifting up the rock under which society had crawled. It is haunting, tragic, striking. You will never forgot it. |
Wisconsin Death Trip
| Customer Rating: | | Buying a classic again. This is the U of New Mexico Press version. The earlier publisher had the picture of the baby in a coffin on the cover. That was better, but the contents are the same. |
Accurate,but not singular
| Customer Rating: | "Wisconsin death trip"is an accurate documentation,not only of "agrarian white"culture at the end of the 19th century but,in many ways,the whole of white culture in america at that time..Contrary to popular belief,the"good"old days were not really so good..Yes,they may well have been less complex,but infant mortality was very high,illnesses which today are highly treatable being killers not only of children but of adults as well,daily life being,for most,a drudgery,with little to show for one's efforts...There were few saftey nets,no antibiotics,no pensions to speak of,no recourse against the harshness life,or against a system that,like today,favors the wealthy..
Insanity was not understood,and "treatment"such as it was,often did little to help the afflicted...Wisconsin did not have a monopoly on such things,anymore than,say,los angles has a monopoly on street gangs,or newark has a monopoly on ghetto housing...
The novelty is perhaps in the seeing of the photographs and the documents all together in one volume,so that one can peruse the sorrowful aspects of that period as it affected one particular area... |
Wisconsin Death Trio
| Customer Rating: | | This is an interesting and slightly macabre book which is strangely beautiful. My son, who is Sam Witt, the poet, told me about it because he had been so moved by it that he wrote a poem associated with it in his soon to be published book, SUNFLOWER BROTHER. The old photos are stunning from the horses to the dead children. I am hoping to get the dvd soon. |
American Gothic Death Rattle
| Customer Rating: | | I read this book over 16 years ago. It left a lasting impression that will stay with me forever. It may not have the same affect on others but reading some of the reviews posted here, I know that it has on most. You can't really ask somebody "did this really happen?" becuase they either died then or in the 100 years that have past. We have no perspective on these people, places and times other than to read books like this. If any of these folks were alive today and heard someone say, "those were the good old days." They might be inclined to give the speaker a quick education. This book will do it for them. I have pictures just like this in a family archive. You wonder how anybody lived into middle or old age. Disease, starvation, hypothermia, and farm accidents all took their toll. Winters are hard enough in the south. Why did these people decide to stop the wagon in Wisconsin or if they lived thru their first winter there, why didn't they head south? I went to a Brewers baseball game at the end of May some 25 years ago and wore a down parka and was cold. You can still see houses in small towns outside of Milwaukee that look like the houses in this book and you can feel the desolation, pain and suffering looking out at you thru 100 year old panes of glass. |
|
