Rating: 
Summary: Finish the book
Review: I can scarcely recall a time when I did not want to read this book. In fact in february of 1996 I read And Their Children After Them, by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, which is a 1989 sequel to Let Us Now Praise, and examines what happened to the people Agee tells us about in this book, and their children. After reading this, I now want to again read what became of the people Let Us Now Praise led us to come to know so intimately. For many pages of this book reading it was a drag, and only my rigid rejection of the "right" of a reader to quit reading a book he has started caused me to continue reading. But in time I became glad I was reading it. The minute listing of every item in a room did not entrance me, but the cumulative effect of the recital of rural poverty accomplished its aim, Agee has his share of nutty ideas, but they do not overly detract from what he is telling us about Alabama in 1936. I am glad I read the book, and I will have to again look at And Their Children After Them.
Rating: 
Summary: Painfully Good Photos and Essays That Sing
Review: I would recommend this book for highschool kids who can handle more difficult phrasing and literary styles..because it is a great read and depicts life in a time that most of us living today can't imagine: the Great Depression. We've all seen some photos of the horrible ravages of the dust bowl era on farmfields in the 1930's..but the pictures included here by Walker Evans are of the faces that witnessed and were living through that ravaging..and they show it. The passages are bleak, darkly humorous at times..and gritty..and best of all..they're real. The passage on young Emma is flawless. I would recommend to anyone who has already read and enjoyed this book a listen to Richard Buckner's album 'Bloomed'..in which he sets to minimal and appealing tune the words that describe Emma's plight. A perfect antidote for the bland materialism of today's mall culture.
Rating:
Summary: Thick prose & amazing photographs.
Review: I'm surprised that no one has yet to write a negative review of this novel. I personally love it, but it would seem like an easy one to hate. The writing it thick, the storyline flows in an unusual way, and the book itself undertakes an epic task. Be warned: Everyone should read this book, but it takes a special kind of person to really enjoy it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Puzzle to be piece together....
Review: James Agee's book on the sharecroppers of the American south during the great depression is a book not to be taken lightly. I read this book for a college english class and I can honestly say that most people in the course including myself are confused by Agee's intent and purpose. Agee's highly lyrical and philosophical tone allows a deep analysis into the question of human existence in the depression south. Yet, the very scope and difficulty of his subject is expressed in his confused, perhaps confusing writing. There are lonely moments of insight stacked alongside pages of seemingly irrelevant and baseless speculation. I say seemingly because each time I re-read the passage I find that Agee's words have quite a bit more meaning than I had originally found. This book is not a novel, not journalism but a puzzle which Agee could not piece together. Only with time and care can the reader hope to understand the frustratingly complex yet real message of Agee's work.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible, but widely misunderstood work
Review: Many people argue about Agee's complex text. The entire body of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is written in a kind of highly emotional euphoria in which Agee combines his own thoughts and perceptions with exhaustive description of the world around him. His intense feeling causes the writing to be, by conventional grammatical standards, virtually unreadable. Once the reader gets past his chapter-long sentences and widely varying themes, however, the book emerges as one of the greatest written accomplishments of the 20th century.While the nominal subject of the documentary is an in-depth exploration of three tenant farming families during the Great Depression, the real project (and Agee himself admits this in his remarkably confessional prose) is the documentation of his own experience living with those farmers for several weeks--sleeping in their vermin-infested beds, eating their home-cooked food, and interacting with them on a human level. In addition, Agee self-consciously writes the text and explores the act of writing, both during his stay with the farmers and several years later, when he completed the vast majority of the book. The final product is a patchwork book pieced together from Biblical prayer, Evans's photographs, Agee's flawless descriptions (which, in several cases, may be more accurate than Evans's probably manipulated prints) and meditations on writing, poverty, art, and day-to-day human experience. Two things make this work remarkable: Agee's honesty (he never claims to be objective or non-judgemental) and his innate talent for description. I approached this book with an open mind, and found it to be one of the most thoughtful and rewarding works I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible, but widely misunderstood work
Review: Many people argue about Agee's complex text. The entire body of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is written in a kind of highly emotional euphoria in which Agee combines his own thoughts and perceptions with exhaustive description of the world around him. His intense feeling causes the writing to be, by conventional grammatical standards, virtually unreadable. Once the reader gets past his chapter-long sentences and widely varying themes, however, the book emerges as one of the greatest written accomplishments of the 20th century. While the nominal subject of the documentary is an in-depth exploration of three tenant farming families during the Great Depression, the real project (and Agee himself admits this in his remarkably confessional prose) is the documentation of his own experience living with those farmers for several weeks--sleeping in their vermin-infested beds, eating their home-cooked food, and interacting with them on a human level. In addition, Agee self-consciously writes the text and explores the act of writing, both during his stay with the farmers and several years later, when he completed the vast majority of the book. The final product is a patchwork book pieced together from Biblical prayer, Evans's photographs, Agee's flawless descriptions (which, in several cases, may be more accurate than Evans's probably manipulated prints) and meditations on writing, poverty, art, and day-to-day human experience. Two things make this work remarkable: Agee's honesty (he never claims to be objective or non-judgemental) and his innate talent for description. I approached this book with an open mind, and found it to be one of the most thoughtful and rewarding works I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: A Puzzle to be piece together....
Review: Starts out with a long discourse that is not easy to read, but soon becomes a detailed and moving description of three tenant famer families. Depressing, but valuable. Photos are very moving.
Rating:
Summary: Detailed and moving
Review: Starts out with a long discourse that is not easy to read, but soon becomes a detailed and moving description of three tenant famer families. Depressing, but valuable. Photos are very moving.
Rating: 
Summary: Deeply Flawed Work; Don't Be Seduced by the Language
Review: This book is indeed a landmark in the (rather young) field of American ethnography; it is a one-of-a-kind work, and a very brave effort by two immensely talented, well-intentioned men. Aesthetically speaking, this is a tremendous work. At the same time, this book's beauty should not overshadow the fact that as a piece of ethnography, it is deeply, even fatally flawed. Agee allows his political agenda and deeply-rooted assumptions about life and poverty in the rural South to completely exclude the lives and thoughts of his subjects, committing the cardinal sin of ethnography. For instance, in describing a bedroom, he talks about an "obscene smelling Bible." How in God's name can a Bible smell obscene? This is a Bible kept on a dresser, well-worn and clearly frequently used. To Agee, this Bible is a pathetic and somehow "obscene" artifact, while it obviously is a treasured spiritual possession that speaks to the core of its owners' existence. Why describe it as "obscene smelling" when you can ask its owner exactly what it means to him or her? Examples like this flood the book, and it is easy to be seduced by Agee's beautiful writing and miss how flawed his perspective is; it is flawed to the core. Remember, this book is ostensibly about rural tenant farmers in the South, but much of it is really about Agee. Keep this in mind when you read it.
Rating:
Summary: And now for something completely different
Review: What is this thing?!?!? - As John Hersey says in the introduction (page xxviii), "There had never been, and there will never be, anything quite like this book."-On the back cover, a dashing Agee is pictured with a glass of what one presumes to be a shot of the strong stuff in his hand. Appropriately, because the writing resembles nothing so much as an (at times) divinely inspired inebriety. He bounces from one form of writing to the next (poetry, descriptive prose, vituperative essay) without so much as a feint of a segue. There is really no narrative form to speak of. It seems clear (to me at least) that Agee didn't know himself what he was doing at times, and the striking pictures of Evans never seem to connect in the way they should with Agee's prose. It's rather like the characters in James Dickey's Deliverence stumbled out into a swath of impoverished farmland to write a book and take some pictures rather than into a soon-to-be dammed up river to take an ill-advised canoe trip. (One is not surprised, somehow, to learn that Agee was one of Dickey's great literary heroes.) ....And yet, for all the muddle, or perhaps because of it, the book has a disconcerting charm that will not let one be. I don't know where to pinpoint it or how to analyze it. But it's there, like some mischievous elf standing before your eyes who will not leave no matter how many times you open and shut your eyes and shake your head...There is a paragraph in the "On The Porch" section toward the end of the book, describing a girl in the dawning of her sexuality: "A phase so unassailably beyond any meaning of tenderness and of trust, so like the opening of the first living upon the shining of the young earth in its first morning..." In the book's finest moments, in Agee's best sections of writing, we feel this painfully fleeting innocence and bliss wafting over the lives of the simple and hard-bitten tenant farmers, a presence almost physical amidst the cruel hardships they endure. Perhaps this is part of the book's mysterious hold on generations of readers.
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