Description: A transporting work of photographic history that offers a haunting vision of how Americans viewed the world at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Brief description: Michael Lesy is one of America's leading photographic scholars. His books include Wisconsin Death Trip, Murder City, Angel's World, and Long Time Coming. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches literary journalism at Hampshire College.
Review Quotes: Michael Lesy has long been known as our foremost photographic historian. With Looking Backward it is time to recognize him as an acerbic, paradoxical, poetic essayist. With a kind of cynical affection, he is, as no one since Mark Twain, absolutely alive to the always shifting imperatives of American know-how, inventiveness, tinkering, salesmanship, expansion, and disappearance.--Greil Marcus