Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

John Berger

Book cover for Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
Book cover for Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

John Berger

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Description

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.

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.

Critical Reviews

"John Berger teaches us how to think, how to feel, how to stare at things till we see what we thought wasn't there. But above all he teaches us how to love in the face of adversity. He is a master."
--Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

"One of the most influential intellectuals of our time."
--Observer

"Berger's is a humane and uniquely confiding voice."
--Teju Cole

"I admire and love John Berger's books ... 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

"Berger is a writer one demands to know more about ... an intriguing and powerful mind and talent."
--New York Times

"Powerful polemicist and precise poet."
--Times

"Berger is never less than eloquent... a heartfelt advocate of those without hope."
--Metro

"Any book by John Berger is an event ... admirers will recognise the characteristic blend of sympathy and lucidity, directness of address, human warmth, and cosmopolitan example."
--Times Literary Supplement

"Rereading Hold Everything Dear, it is striking to realize--to an utterly tragic degree--how there is nothing new in the devastation of the past two years, nor in the crass power dynamics of the second Trump administration. What is shocking, however, is to measure how impoverished public discourse has become...Undoubtedly the most urgent and relevant of Berger's writings on art, politics, and conflict."
--Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, 4Columns

Publishing Information

Publisher: Verso
Pub date: 2025-03-25
Length: 160 pages

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