Hardback
Forthcoming
John Berger:From Life
A MAGISTERIAL BIOGRAPHY OF NOVELIST, CRITIC, AND PAINTER JOHN BERGER, WHOSE WORK – INCLUDING WAYS OF SEEING AND THE BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING G. – REVOLUTIONIZED THE CRITICAL TRADITION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
John Berger (1926–2017) served in Britain’s wartime army before attending art school. The young artist became a critic and broadcaster, cutting a swathe through the staid world of post-war Britain, demanding political engagement in all things. In 1972, he came to prominence with Ways of Seeing, a TV series and book that inspired generations to look more closely and think more deeply about art.
Committed to the passionate exploration of life in all its forms, unbounded by convention, he applied himself to a panoply of genres, media, and subjects. His career defies definition. His work reimagined the relationship between art and society; human and animal; living and dead. He charted the disappearance of peasants from the world; documented migrant labour; explored the AIDS crisis; and was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s, as he was to the War on Terror that followed. Berger was deeply and vocally committed to the Palestinian cause.
Through working on Berger’s archive at the British Library and fifteen years of getting to know his family, friends, lovers, and collaborators, Tom Overton has produced a portrait of an artist and storyteller who defined and transcended his times.
Reviews
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A life, as [Berger] saw it, doesn’t become a story until it ends, and the writer’s task is to bear witness to that process, connecting us to the past…This is the through line Overton finds in Berger’s widely varied life and work: a conviction that the dead, by dying, leave us with their stories, and that our common life depends on how well we remember and tell them.
, The Paris Review -
[Overton] offers new glimpses into the great critic’s life and mind.
Art in America -
An authoritative, nuanced biography…Overton, archivist of the papers of John Berger at the British Library and editor of several collections of his essays, draws on a trove of primary sources, interviews, and his personal relationship with Berger to create a perceptive portrait of the influential painter, novelist, and critic.
Kirkus Reviews
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There couldn’t be a better way to celebrate the centenary of John Berger, born in 1926, than this extraordinary biography, written by Tom Overton. John Berger: From Life reveals not only the innovative and experimental nature of Berger’s historical and political insight, but the immense range of his intellectual output
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Overton follows his subject through an imposing span of 20th century artistic, literary, and political concerns—from cubism to the Second Intifada—in a painterly manner, leaving traces of his materials and his process on the page like brushstrokes.
, Protean Magazine -
Beautifully evocative, very moving, and splendidly written
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In Tom Overton’s remarkable biography, we meet Berger again as someone who touched every soul he met, and whose determination to find a way through and beyond the twentieth century saw him change with the times without ever relinquishing his faith in the things that could shore us up against the ravages of history: art, universalism, Marx, nature, humanity, friendship, love. A wonderfully tender monument to a unique and inspiring man.
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His exuberant biography is thick with detail and lit by wonder. It strains to paint the whole canvas and give us the man in full, warts and all.