Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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!

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.

A century ago, Jacob A. Riis was a household name to most newspaper-reading Americans. Riis, a Danish immigrant who had risen from abject poverty to achieve the "American Dream," became the leading social critic, investigative reporter, and "muckraking" photojournalist of the day. His powerful 1890 expose of New York City's slum life entitled How the Other Half Lives propelled Riis to instant notoriety and even captured the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who was then an up-and-coming New York City politician. Indeed, the two became life-long friends and partners in the Progressive-era campaign to reform urban poverty.

Author and journalist Tom Buk-Swienty provides a much needed and updated biography of this once well-known crusading "social" photographer. A fellow Dane, the author currently resides in Ribe, the small Danish town in which Riis himself was born and grew to manhood. Fittingly, Buk-Swienty begins his biography in this quaint medieval town, exploring how its timeless village life and mores shaped the man Riis was later to become. In this setting, too, he examines the principal reason why Riis immigrated to America: to escape a failed romance with the woman of his dreams.

In the US, Riis struggled to earn a living. He worked a variety of odd jobs, lived in homeless shelters, and even reached a point of near starvation. Buk-Swienty highlights how this precarious existence led Riis to a lifetime of social activism on behalf of his fellow poor and marginalized immigrants in late nineteenth-century New York City. The turning-point in Riis's life came in 1870, when he landed a job as a low-paid journalist at one of the city's daily newspapers. Riis went on to earn a name for himself (and a handsome salary) as a police reporter for the New York Tribune. He even married the woman who had spurned his earlier romantic overtures!

Nevertheless, Riis spent much of his free time exploring the new medium of photography and how it could be use for the "social uplift" (i.e., the socioeconomic improvement) of the lives of the million or so immigrants who crowded New York City's dilapidated and over-crowded tenements. Armed with the newly developed "flash" unit, Riis was able to penetrate the darkest corners of New York City's wretched slums, especially that of Mulberry Street, and thus chronicle the lives of the urban poor. In the late 1880s, Riis began his famous "magic lantern" slide show to horrified middle-class audiences, who in turn demanded sweeping urban renewal from complacent and often corrupt politicians. Beginning in 1890, moreover, Riis wrote a series of books, replete with powerful photographs, depicting "how the other half" of America lives. These works created a decades-long "fire storm" of urban renewal and reform across America. This notoriety also transformed the crusading photo-journalist into an instant celebrity. Nonetheless, Riis never lost sight of his ultimate "American Dream": the dramatic improvement in the daily lives, working conditions, and living standards of America's urban poor. In fact, Riis fell ill from heart complications while on the lecture circuit and died shortly thereafter at only age 65. Tom Buk-Swienty's biography, complete with some of Riis's most famous photographs, is a fitting tribute to this selfless and tireless social activist, who, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, was truly the "ideal American."