A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe [Paperback]

Why does the Western world look to migrant laborers to perform the most menial tasks? What compels people to leave their homes and accept this humiliating situation? In A Seventh Man, John Berger and Jean Mohr come to grips with what it is to be a migrant worker—the material circumstances and the inner experience—and, in doing so, reveal how the migrant is not so much on the margins of modern life, but absolutely central to it. First published in 1975, this finely wrought exploration remains as urgent as ever, presenting a mode of living that pervades the countries of the West and yet is excluded from much of its culture. I admire and love John Berger’s books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting—in contemporary English letters, he seems to be peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. He is a wonderful artist and thinker.
—Susan Sontag

This book is ever more timely.
—Geoff Dyer

His most remarkable book
—Economist

I found opening A Seventh Man again troubling, even mournful. Because its prescience is matched by its nuance…This is why Berger is such a significant presence, still. He was a writer beyond the noble occupation of the critic, not just in the forms of literature he engaged in but in his wide-ranging, generation-traversing humanity.
—Ben Luke, The Art Newspaper

Today, A Seventh Man emerges as a prescient work, when read against a sea of startling images arriving all the time from Lesvos, Lampedusa, the US southern border, the Rafa? crossing. Yet the blÓ*