[.ca] Wisconsin Death Trip (ISBN 0826321933)

From Amazon.com:
The last decade of the 19th century was, for some Americans, a time when great fortunes were to be made. For many others, however, the period was a time of economic dislocation, when the gap between city and countryside, rich and poor, grew ever wider. As the Indian Wars ended and the Gilded Age extended into America's first Imperial Age, social critics such as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells began to examine the dark side of the American dream: violence, poverty, degenerate behavior, suicide, and insanity. In the late 1960s, another desperate time, historian Michael Lesy took a long look at fin-de-siècle America. Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. First published in 1973, Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, now reissued in a handsome paperbound edition, became a key text of the counterculture, a book to shelve alongside Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Custer Died for Your Sins--and it sometimes reads like a hip product of its time. Lesy documents the unsettling record of one small corner of rural America, turning up accounts of barn burnings, attacks by gangs of armed tramps, threatening and obscene letters, death by diphtheria and smallpox (the Wisconsin townsfolk had, some years, to attend several funerals a week), alcoholism, madness, business and bank failures, and even a case or two of witchcraft. After reading Lesy's texts and viewing the sometimes unsettling images he's turned up, you would be forgiven for thinking that no one in small-town Wisconsin in our great-great-grandparents' time was well-adjusted--which is, of course, not the case. Hyperbole notwithstanding, this is a remarkable study, one that Lesy himself rightly calls an experiment in both history and alchemy. --Gregory McNamee

disturbing and informative:
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.

Vivid Truth of agrarian White American History:
I read this book frequently during the 70's after leaving Wisconsin where I went to college and lived briefly on a farm. The impact has remained with me throughout my life; the devastating loneliness and alienation and great griefs that actually are so much a part of the 'roots' of white America. The spectre of the end of the timeless native american cultures, without a media to sensationalize or distort, were nevertheless traumatic to watch. Especially to people for whom there were few social holding places- in a world plagued and stark. The style of the book with entries from the State Assylum intake log, the local newspapers, some journals and the shocking family pictures, and pictures of the dead, constitutes a multiple fact assault that feels nothing less than gothic fiction. I don't believe it is possible to get a clearer understanding of the European agrarian foundations of America- and the incipient madness that was never far from the essence of that life. My Antonia is like a fairy tale by comparison.

Through a glass very darkly:
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.

This Book Inspired "A Prayer for the Dying":
I am happy that a new edition of this book will be out in April. The recently published novel by Stuart O'Nan, "A Prayer for the Dying," was inspired by "Wisconsin Death Trip." Fans of the latter will absolutely have to check out O'Nan's haunting novel, based in Friendship, Wisconsin shortly after the Civil War. "Prayer" is available at Amazon.com, and getting all sorts of rave reviews. Check it out!

I FOUND IT!:
I found the book at my local library today and I can't wait to start reading it! It has a lot of neat pictures in it that I've seen so far. I hope this book is as neat as it sounds!