Hold Everything Dear - (The Essential John Berger) by John Berger (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A powerful meditation on political resistance and the global search for justice

From the 'War on Terror' to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering.

These essays offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself.

Review Quotes

"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

"Hold Everything Dear has come off the bench in a moment when Berger's reflections on war, poverty, art, and language have only grown more resonant."
--Eli Recht-Appel, The Indypendent

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.