A Seventh Man - (The Essential John Berger) by John Berger (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Why does the Western world look to migrant laborers to perform the most menial tasks? What compels people to leave their homes and accept this humiliating situation? In A Seventh Man, John Berger and Jean Mohr come to grips with what it is to be a migrant worker--the material circumstances and the inner experience--and, in doing so, reveal how the migrant is not so much on the margins of modern life, but absolutely central to it. First published in 1975, this finely wrought exploration remains as urgent as ever, presenting a mode of living that pervades the countries of the West and yet is excluded from much of its culture.

Review Quotes

"I admire and love John Berger's books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting--in contemporary English letters, he seems to be peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. He is a wonderful artist and thinker."
--Susan Sontag

"This book is ever more timely."
--Geoff Dyer

"His most remarkable book"
--Economist

"I found opening A Seventh Man again troubling, even mournful. Because its prescience is matched by its nuance...This is why Berger is such a significant presence, still. He was a writer beyond the noble occupation of the critic, not just in the forms of literature he engaged in but in his wide-ranging, generation-traversing humanity."
--Ben Luke, The Art Newspaper

"Today, A Seventh Man emerges as a prescient work, when read against a sea of startling images arriving all the time from Lesvos, Lampedusa, the US southern border, the Rafa? crossing. Yet the book is also of a piece with experimental art of its own era. Joshua Sperling, author of A Writer of Our Time, sees its abrupt cuts and shifts in perspective in the vein of Jean-Luc Godard and the militant Dziga Vertov Group."
--Nicholas Gamso, e-flux

About the Author

Storyteller, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic, John Berger is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, Here Is Where We Meet, the Booker Prize-winning novel G, Hold Everything Dear, the Man Booker-longlisted From A to X, and A Seventh Man.

Jean Mohr's longstanding collaboration with John Berger has produced five books, including A Seventh Man and A Fortunate Man. Among his other works are After the Last Sky (with Edward Said) and Side by Side or Face to Face. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland.