The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America [Hardcover]

Tom Buk-Swienty (Author), Annette Buk-Swienty (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2008

Social reformer Jacob Riis made it impossible for Americans to look the other way; now this inspiring biography restores his greatness.

Drawing on previously unexamined diaries and letters, The Other Half marvelously re-creates the moving story of Jacob Riis, the legendary Progressive reformer and muckraking photographer. Born in 1849 in rural Denmark, Riis immigrated to America in 1870 following a devastating romantic breakup. Penniless and starving, Riis stumbled into journalism, eventually becoming a charismatic police reporter for the New York Tribune, where he befriended Theodore Roosevelt and witnessed firsthand the appalling tenement conditions of late nineteenth-century New York. His resulting exposé, How the Other Half Lives, was the first major American muckraking book. It brought Americans in touch with their lost humanity, establishing a precedent for Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jane Addams, and Upton Sinclair. Described by Roosevelt as "the ideal American," Riis died in 1914, mourned by millions, a celebrated hero. Tom Buk-Swienty's long-awaited biography, a superb evocation of the muckraking era, is a compelling work, designed with 55 haunting images from Riis's own photographic oeuvre. 55 photographs

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

Jacob Riis, an ambitious carpenter from a rural town in Denmark who became famous for his photojournalistic expos� of the squalor of Manhattan�s tenements, abandoned his homeland after being spurned by a local beauty, and spent several years as a tramp and itinerant worker in Buffalo and western Pennsylvania. This biography vividly captures that time, during which Riis was constantly on the verge of exhaustion and destitution. His experience of poverty shaped his later attempts to humanize it, in the stark images and text of his seminal book �How the Other Half Lives.� Buk-Swienty esteems his subject without idolizing him, noting that Riis sought to improve the living conditions of the poor in part to stave off anarchy and a Communist revolution.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:0316057584 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: The seventeenth and final novel in Rankin�s Inspector Rebus series is set during the Edinburgh detective�s final week at work. (He is nearing the mandatory retirement age of sixty.) The novel begins with a dissident Russian poet beaten to death, and expands to take in small-time drug dealers, cloak-wearing women who act in walking mystery tours of the city, international oligarchs, and Scottish bank executives. A contemporary artist who makes sound installations may be in league with politicians agitating for Scotland�s independence. Rebus is as gruffly mischievous as ever, and the novel ends in a cliffhanger scene with his arch-enemy that will have readers gasping into the blank space that follows. Rankin�s work is crime fiction at its most consuming, cerebral best.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:1416572104 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: Kureishi�s latest novel returns to the subject of immigrant life in London�a theme that brought him early success, with the screenplay for �My Beautiful Laundrette� and the novel �The Buddha of Suburbia��but adds to it the jaundiced outlook of middle age. Jamal, an outwardly respectable psychoanalyst, harbors dark secrets, which generate the novel�s thrillerlike plot, and darker desires. Kureishi fulsomely depicts the sexual frustrations and adventures of a middle-aged man: �the underbelly�or potbelly, more like�of British suburban sexuality,� as one of Jamal�s many disaffected ex-girlfriends puts it. And therapy, an experience that a patient compares to �being stirred inside by a huge spoon,� provides Kureishi with fertile ground for caricature. At heart, however, this is a novel about guilt and retribution, as Jamal comes to terms with his past and realizes the terrible truth that �to conceal is to reveal.�
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:0810972980 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: Because Vanity Fair ran from 1913 to 1936, ceased publication, and then resumed in 1983, this dazzling panoply of twentieth-century fame has some striking absences: no Elvis, no Marilyn, no Beatles. The two resulting eras are presented not chronologically but mostly as a series of then-and-now diptychs: Clark Gable opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Fred and Adele Astaire opposite the Olsen twins, H. G. Wells opposite Tom Wolfe. (It�s presumably happenstance that Richard Perle is opposite Goebbels.) Comparing the two eras is hard. The later one is more excessive, but it often undercuts its own grandiosity with humor or menace, making earlier celebrity seem more innocent. If Edward Steichen�s Isadora Duncan against the Parthenon is the epochal image of the first run, Annie Leibovitz�s multi-person tableaux, as static and riddling as allegorical paintings, typify the current style. Occasionally, a subject (Salvador Dali) or a photographer (Horst P. Horst) had the longevity to figure in both periods.
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END

From Booklist

Beyond his famous photographs of slums, Jacob Riis (1849–1914) may be a cipher to students of American social reform. They aren’t responsible: no Riis biography has been published for decades, and never one as thorough as this. Written by a Danish journalist, the biography capitalizes on Riis’ extensive writings as well as on the background of the book that made Riis famous, How the Other Half Lives (1890). Before the publication of that book, however, Riis’ life was a descent from a middle-class household to hand-to-mouth vagrancy, lacerated by unrequited love from which he fled by immigrating to America. From Riis’ nadir of a contemplated suicide, Buk-Swienty chronicles Riis’ perseverance and luck, which placed him on a journalistic road to success as well as a fairy tale–like return to his one true love, Elisabeth Giørtz. Following the now-established Riis on his prowls around New York City as a police reporter, Buk-Swienty imparts the squalor of streets and tenements that Riis eventually exposed in his photographs. Many of the latter illustrate this much-needed portrait. --Gilbert Taylor

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First English Edition edition (August 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393060233
• ISBN-13: 978-0393060232
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #556,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #37 in Books > History > Europe > Denmark

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb biography of Jacob Riis, December 20, 2008

By 

W. Langlois - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America (Hardcover)

Regardless of whether you have read "How the Other Half Lives," this biography of its author, reformer and muckraker Jacob Riis, will be an enjoyable and informative excursion into the past. The details of Riis' early life in Ribe, Denmark and his obsession with and eventual marriage to Elisabeth Giortz are engrossing.

At age 21, Riis migrated to America where his struggle to survive in the streets of New York City motivated his lifelong efforts at reforming that city's tenement slums and helping those who lived in them.

The Riis photographs that are included in the book capture the plight of the tenement dweller but are also works of art. Riis is the father of photojournalism, and the photographs are a wonderful record of his work. I particularly enjoyed the chapter that described Riis searching through the slums at midnight for photography subjects and using primitive flash equipment to get candid shots of the tenement dwellers.

Tom Buk-Swienty, the author, apparently wrote this book in Danish. Some translations are an awkward chore to read. This translation by Annette Buk-Swienty is a wonderfully crafted English rendering.

I highly recommend this biography of Jacob Riis.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A real surprise, September 25, 2009

By 

Ken (Durham, NH United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America (Hardcover)

I first read the book in Danish. A cousin in Denmark sent it to me for my birthday. I enjoyed the book so much that I bought a copy in English to circulate among friends. Although I knew of Jakob Riis, I didn't know much about him. Now I do. His life had many unusual twists and turns. His marriage was so surprising. Read the book and you'll see why. Riis is an excellent example of how one person can make a difference in the lives of many. As he lay dying, his last days were covered by the nations press. It's curious how a person, so well known a century ago, is now unknown to most Americans. At the end of the book we find out that much of what is in the book was almost lost. Fate played a big part in Riis's life. Read the book!

4.0 out of 5 stars Tells the Story, May 4, 2010

By 

Loves the View "Louise" (Hawaii) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America (Hardcover)

This book was written in Danish and translated to English. The author includes enough US history to orient his Danish readers and enough history of Denmark for non-Danes to understand the times there. While this is a biography, there is much about the first part that is generic to the immigrant experience of that time in the US.

Riis has unusual drive. He survives unemployment, hunger, cold, loneliness and unrequited love. There is background about his childhood that predicts that he will be a sensitive adult, so it is not surprising that he relates to the poor and can tell their stories.

Riis has tenacity not only in work (he is diligent in all his careers from planing doors to selling irons to practicing journalism in English, (a foreign language to him) but also love. He carries a torch for his first love in Denmark for 12 years.

One interesting aspect of his life was his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt. It would be strange in these times to have a Police Commissioner so reliant on a reporter for advice. Another is the character of Elizabeth who must have been very flexible in spirit. Her pictures show her retaining her youthful appearance, which was rare for the times. She was raised in a castle, hardly preparation for the adult life she chose.

Most of the life and actions are presented with some analysis but a few need more treatment. There is a good discussion of whether or not its fair to accuse Riis of ethnic prejudice. There isn't much known about why Riis' hometown more or less snubbed him, but author explores possibilities. The author says nothing, however, about relocating the Mulberry Bend tenants (landlords were paid $1.5 million). If they were left to fend for themselves, it should have been noted. Similarly the author says nothing about why Riis seemed to separate from his grown children.

Pertinant photos introduce the chapters, but the reader needs to flip forward to see what they are about. There are two sections of glossies, and they are labeled.

Overall, the book succeeds in telling the story of Jacob Riis.