Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Wisconsin Death Trip
Book Review: Excellent history of a people going mad
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the most interesting and visually disconcerning books I have read for a long time. This book will make you feel uncomfortable but fascinate you at the same time. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in hsitory.Book Review: Fascinating content, but poor quality book overall...
Summary: 3 Stars
I've been searching for this book for so long I thought it must be out of print, so I was extremely happy to find it on Amazon. As is pointed out in some other reviews, it paints a pretty grim portait of the Not So Good Old Days, and it's not for the faint-hearted. Still worth buying, but DO NOT buy the paperback. I was extremely disappointed in the overall quality of the book. It started falling apart the very first day I got it, and now it's a nothing more than a sheaf of pages.Book Review: History Lesson of A Small Town
Summary: 3 Stars
This book, in words and pictures, is an intriguing, but dark history lesson of a small town in Wisconsin called Black River Falls. The pictures are testaments to how harsh the conditions were, and there definitely more sombre moments than jubilant, funerals of children for instance, but it's not a morbid journey. Looking at some of the faces of the people, you get a feeling that they were determined to endure, and I found myself hoping that a lot of them made their dreams real, no matter how simple those dreams may have been. I will warn you though, the accounts out of the local newspapers are depressing, and I couldn't help but wonder if anything happy ever happened in this town!Book Review: Mesmerizing
Summary: 5 Stars
In the spring of 2000, I was sitting in the admissions office at Hampshire College, waiting to be interviewed. With some time to kill, I browsed a bookshelf featuring the works of Hampshire professors. One of these books was Wisconsin Death Trip. It caught my attention thanks to the Static-X album of the same name (of which I was a big fan at the time...no longer, though), so I pulled it from the shelf to find that haunting cover photo staring at me with its dark, blurry eyes. It drew me in, in a way that was far from comfortable. It left me no choice. I had to see what was inside.
As it turned out, I had a long wait for my interview, and I made it through most of the book. If it had been anything other than a sunny spring afternoon, I doubt the interview would have gone well at all. Suicide and murder, madness and despair, babies in coffins and grim stone-faced Lutherans. The images were haunting, and those conjured up by the simple matter-of-fact accounts even more so. This book haunted me.
Fast forward a year and a half, and I'm a first-year student at Hampshire. I walk into the bookstore and what do I see but Wisconsin Death Trip. I'm short on cash, but I buy it. I haven't really got a choice. Just about everyone who comes into my room gets to look at it. Fortunately, this is Hampshire College, so that probably helps my social life a bit.
Four years later, the Death Trip still holds a prominent place on my shelf. Every so often I take it out and open it, and inevitably I end up reading it cover to cover. This book is powerful, haunting, and above all else important. Uncomfortable as it may be, this is American history. This is a tale of the price we pay for progress. These are the souls who were caught in the gears of the machine.
In my time at Hampshire I had Mr. Lesy as a teacher. Towards the end of the semester, I asked him why he felt compelled to write this book. He told me that after looking through the images and articles used herein, that he realized that he was looking at "an American Holocaust." And that, he felt, was something that people needed to know about. I wholeheartedly agree.
Pick up this book and you will not put it down.
Book Review: Moving, effective, original, singular
Summary: 5 Stars
Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, originally a doctoral thesis, is one of the most touching, poetic, beautiful, harrowing, moving and dislocating works I have read. Basically a compendium of found glass plate negative photos taken by the (himself knock-knees odd) Charles Vam Schaik in and around the rural community of Black River Falls WI, and leavened by snippets taken from the Badger State Banner newspaper and the Mendota State Record Book (an insane asylum), as well as a few personal reminisces, the book instead is a commentary and an indictment of a brutal time of economic dislocation, social upheaval, religious confusion and obsession, and personal decay in a farming community. It is an endless repitition of suicide, madness, arson, children dying of disease, and of a mostly sternly religious people living the grimmest of lives of back breaking work in the country. The photos by their sheer repetition and some of the games played with them by the author, pound out a tattoo of strain, people only barely suppressing their madness, and a society truly on the edge of collapse. Hardly the bucolic paradise so often evoked in our time.
The afterword by the author provides some backstory and statistics backing the point up, and illustrating in numbers and facts what the pictures and excerpts made clear by anecdote, and is also well written.
This was something of a cult book in the mid 70s, a most unusual way of looking at local history, lifting up the rock under which society had crawled. It is haunting, tragic, striking. You will never forgot it.