Dispatches on Survival and Resistance Email this review
Slender, slight collection of aphoristic essays by British art
critic, novelist and political activist Berger (Here is Where We
Meet, 2006, etc.).  “Are you still a Marxist?” Berger, echoing
an interlocutor, asks in one piece later in the book. He answers
in the affirmative, but not before writing, gnomically, “Every
day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not
their home but a chosen destination” (yes, for that way lies
London, the Pantheon, and points beyond) and urging, “The
consumer is essentially somebody who feels, or is made to feel,
lost, unless he or she is consuming” (oh, blessed circularity!).
The question, the answers, are characteristic of Berger; the
approach is of signal interest when approaching, say, a piece by
Tatlin or Chagall or Van Gogh, much less so when brought to bear
on literal matters of life and death, for does anyone but Harold
Pinter need take notice when such observations as “What makes a
terrorist is, first