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| Wisconsin Death Trip (Wisconsin) | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Lesy
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $21.92
You Save: $13.03 (37%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $19.30
Avg. Customer Rating:  (29 reviews)
Sales Rank: 48464
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 261
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 11 x 8.5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0826321933
Dewey Decimal Number: 977.551
EAN: 9780826321930
ASIN: 0826321933
Publication Date: January 1, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.
Amazon.com Review
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-siecle 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 Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters's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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
Moving, effective, original, singular August 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Wisconsin Death Trip November 22, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Buying a classic again. This is the U of New Mexico Press version. The earlier publisher had the picture of the baby in a coffin on the cover. That was better, but the contents are the same.
Accurate,but not singular June 14, 2007
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
"Wisconsin death trip"is an accurate documentation,not only of "agrarian white"culture at the end of the 19th century but,in many ways,the whole of white culture in america at that time..Contrary to popular belief,the"good"old days were not really so good..Yes,they may well have been less complex,but infant mortality was very high,illnesses which today are highly treatable being killers not only of children but of adults as well,daily life being,for most,a drudgery,with little to show for one's efforts...There were few saftey nets,no antibiotics,no pensions to speak of,no recourse against the harshness life,or against a system that,like today,favors the wealthy..
Insanity was not understood,and "treatment"such as it was,often did little to help the afflicted...Wisconsin did not have a monopoly on such things,anymore than,say,los angles has a monopoly on street gangs,or newark has a monopoly on ghetto housing...
The novelty is perhaps in the seeing of the photographs and the documents all together in one volume,so that one can peruse the sorrowful aspects of that period as it affected one particular area...
Wisconsin Death Trio January 18, 2007
1 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is an interesting and slightly macabre book which is strangely beautiful. My son, who is Sam Witt, the poet, told me about it because he had been so moved by it that he wrote a poem associated with it in his soon to be published book, SUNFLOWER BROTHER. The old photos are stunning from the horses to the dead children. I am hoping to get the dvd soon.
American Gothic Death Rattle December 15, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I read this book over 16 years ago. It left a lasting impression that will stay with me forever. It may not have the same affect on others but reading some of the reviews posted here, I know that it has on most. You can't really ask somebody "did this really happen?" becuase they either died then or in the 100 years that have past. We have no perspective on these people, places and times other than to read books like this. If any of these folks were alive today and heard someone say, "those were the good old days." They might be inclined to give the speaker a quick education. This book will do it for them. I have pictures just like this in a family archive. You wonder how anybody lived into middle or old age. Disease, starvation, hypothermia, and farm accidents all took their toll. Winters are hard enough in the south. Why did these people decide to stop the wagon in Wisconsin or if they lived thru their first winter there, why didn't they head south? I went to a Brewers baseball game at the end of May some 25 years ago and wore a down parka and was cold. You can still see houses in small towns outside of Milwaukee that look like the houses in this book and you can feel the desolation, pain and suffering looking out at you thru 100 year old panes of glass.
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