Wisconsin Death Trip

Rating:
Summary: disturbing and informative
Review: the pictures in this book explain a lot to me,seeing as my family originally came from this part of wisconsin. and many of them were insane.

Rating:
Summary: A reading experience
Review: There is relatively little I can say about this book.

The book is essentially photographs and news clippings from a newspaper in Wisconsin from about 1890 to 1910. Interspersed are snippets from novels dealing with life during the period.

Turning the pages, reading the articles, and looking not at the pictures but into the eyes of the people in the photographs, one gets a sense not of some sterilized, backward glance at these people as some great societal force, not as a band of pioneers, but as very human people, who die in childbirth, die as children, die of diseases that sweep through whole towns and infect the entire state with fear, go insane, murder, and still maintain enough inner dignity to be able to look into the lens of a camera and mask most of their emotions long enough for the half-second exposure but not long enough to pierce the heart of people living a century later. It is pain. It is a death trip.

The book speaks for itself. Actually, it doesn't. The people in word and image speak for themselves.

Rating:
Summary: A reading experience
Review: There is relatively little I can say about this book.

The book is essentially photographs and news clippings from a newspaper in Wisconsin from about 1890 to 1910. Interspersed are snippets from novels dealing with life during the period.

Turning the pages, reading the articles, and looking not at the pictures but into the eyes of the people in the photographs, one gets a sense not of some sterilized, backward glance at these people as some great societal force, not as a band of pioneers, but as very human people, who die in childbirth, die as children, die of diseases that sweep through whole towns and infect the entire state with fear, go insane, murder, and still maintain enough inner dignity to be able to look into the lens of a camera and mask most of their emotions long enough for the half-second exposure but not long enough to pierce the heart of people living a century later. It is pain. It is a death trip.

The book speaks for itself. Actually, it doesn't. The people in word and image speak for themselves.

Rating:
Summary: A strange account.
Review: This book is eerily intriguing. In one small area in Wisconsin, strange things happen. There is a high death rate, a high insanity rate, and many accounts of strange happenings. This book is very interesting, and some of the pictures are rather unsettling. Michael Lesy has done a very compelling study of these people, and provides first-hand details of what went wrong in this section of Wisconsin. I highly recommend reading this disturbingly interesting book.

Rating:
Summary: A strange account.
Review: This book is eerily intriguing. In one small area in Wisconsin, strange things happen. There is a high death rate, a high insanity rate, and many accounts of strange happenings. This book is very interesting, and some of the pictures are rather unsettling. Michael Lesy has done a very compelling study of these people, and provides first-hand details of what went wrong in this section of Wisconsin. I highly recommend reading this disturbingly interesting book.

Rating:
Summary: History Lesson of A Small Town
Review: This book, in words and pictures, is an intriguing, but dark history lesson of a small town in Wisconsin called Black River Falls. The pictures are testaments to how harsh the conditions were, and there definitely more sombre moments than jubilant, funerals of children for instance, but it's not a morbid journey. Looking at some of the faces of the people, you get a feeling that they were determined to endure, and I found myself hoping that a lot of them made their dreams real, no matter how simple those dreams may have been. I will warn you though, the accounts out of the local newspapers are depressing, and I couldn't help but wonder if anything happy ever happened in this town!

Rating:
Summary: Through a glass very darkly
Review: This brilliant book well deserved its reissue. Lesy's photographic essay of the nasty, brutish, and short lives of our immediate forebears makes us shockingly aware of what a grind life was not too long ago. Murder, sadness, and regret practically ooze out of this book's pages, but somehow beautifully. This work is essential for anyone interested in history, photojournalism, or the human condition.