regeneration

Pat Barker's Regeneration: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries)
$12.95
This guide has enhanced my teaching of _Regeneration_ no end. And I feel confident in recommending it to my students. Even if they only read the first short chapter, about Barker's background and upbringing, I've found that it helps a great deal in putting this novel into context. I also like the links to useful websites provided at the back of the book (note to the Publisher: a couple of these no longer work properly). I'd like to thank Ms Westman for producing this book. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has found it this helpful.

Regeneration
$13.38
Regeneration is the first in the Pat Barker (born in Yorkshire in 1943 and the winner of the Booker Prize) novels on World War I from the English point of view.
This initial volume takes place at a military hospital in Scotland. It is a hospital specializing in shell shock and soldiers experiencing psychological traumas following conflict in the hellhole of the French trenches. Several of the patients and their cases are presented.
The main character is Dr. William Rivers a psychologist who is a compassionate man. Rivers family knew the author Lewis Carroll and he comes from a economically comfortable social milieu. Rivers stutters and has disturbing dreams about the war. He admires the moral stand taken by Sassoon but knows he has been ordered to regenerate him for active duty back in the Dantean hell of the French front.
The novel begins with a letter of protest written by Lt. Siegrfried Sassoon who expresses his outrage for the senseless slaughter on the Western Front. He is a brave officer who has been decorated for his heroism but is sent home to recuperate in Scotland. After several months he will be returned to active duty. Sassoon has several famous pacifists for friends including philosopher Bertrand Russell; novelist H.G. Wells and his fellow British officer Robert Graves who would later write "I Claudius" and his own war memoir.
Rivers tells us of the friendship which developed between Sassoon and the young poet Wilfred Owen who admired Sassoon's published poetry. These two men and Rivers are historical figures. Sassoon survived the war dying in 1967 while Owen was killed in France during the last days of the war in 1918.
A fictional character Billy Prior is initially mute when he comes to the hospital but regains his voice. Billy falls in love with a munition factory worker who comes from a lower class than he. Barker discusses their sex scenes in explicit terms. Barker also uses slang and profanity as she invents words for the characters to speak.
This is a wonderful anti-war novel showing the stupidity, brutality and the high cost of war on the lives of all who are involved in its madness.
Barker's prose is spare reminding this reviewer of a Hemingwayesque style.
The novel is one of the best by a British author in the 1990s. It is widely known and has won plaudits from the critics as well it should.

The Regeneration Trilogy: "Regeneration", "Eye in the Door", "Ghost Road"
$60.07
I think Regeneration is one of the great novels of the 20th century. Its fictional recreation of historic events and people, brilliantly imagined, and its portrayal of the moral complexity facing the characters, are both extraordinary. Rivers gradually realizes that his job is to make officers well enough to go back to a morally bankrupt struggle. Sassoon decides that even though he decries the war and its senseless slaughter, he must go back to his men at the front. The themes are grand but made human by the wonderful characters. And the little touches are so powerful, as when a pretty girl walks into a ward of dreadfully wounded soldiers and is astonished by her impact. The whole trilogy is terrific, but the first volume, above all, is a true classic.

reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow
$35.00
If you're looking for a book of pretty pictures, this is not it - the authors say as much. Or if you're looking for a book of pictures at the level of your favorite big name photographers, this book is not that either - again the authors say as much. What it is is a book of work by students and recent graduates (as of 2005) of a range of prominent art programs who have a real chance to be among the great photographers twenty years from now (2025, counting from 2005).

As another commenter has pointed out, what you see in this book is very filtered. This too the authors acknowledge. The fifty photographers whose work appears in the book (four pages each, four full page or more half page or smaller) were chosen as follows:

* The authors decided to seek candidates only from photography programs in art schools and other academic institutions.
* The authors chose sixty programs to extend invitations to.
* The faculty of the programs chose up to ten students and recent grads to offer nominations to.
* The students had to accept the offer.
* The faculty and students together (presumably) chose the specific work to submit.
* The work will have generally been done within the program and have been approved and supervised by the faculty.
* Finally, the authors selected the fifty "winners" from the almost four hundred submissions received (a rate of about one in eight).

Some demographics on the fifty:

* Gender: M 29, F 21
* Average year of birth: 1976 (age as of 2005: 29)
* Average years of attendance in program: 2001-2004
* Countries of birth/nationality: Switzerland 10, US 8, Germany 6, France 4, England 3, Israel, Japan, Netherlands and South Africa 2, Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Sweden and Taiwan 1
* Countries of programs: Switzerland and US 10, France 6, England 5, Germany 4, Canada 3, Italy 2, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand and South Africa 1

As a point of interest, both Musee de l'Elysee, the institution that carried out the project, and Jaeger-LeCoultre, the company that funded it, are Swiss.

In making their selection, the authors applied at least one criterion that they explicitly state, which is that "there had to be a manifest intelligence behind the work." To verify this they asked the candidates to make a statement as to what they were trying to accomplish with their work and then evaluated the work against the statement. In doing this they clearly favored series (something you would expect from the programs anyway) and were very sympathetic to conceptual and theory-driven art (also to be expected from the programs).

At the same time the authors also insist that, as selective as they were, the work they chose was representative of the submissions as a whole and is characteristic of current work across the range of programs. Some of the specific trends (and anti-trends) they note include:

* Extreme dominance of color over black and white (only two artists in the book show B&W).
* Wide use of digital (i.e. Photoshop) techniques ranging from enhancement to selective removal of objects to compositing to radical transformation.
* Low/non-representation of some historically important genres including street photography and nudes, to which I would add narrative and other "fictional" forms along the lines of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson.
* Self-consciousness and a measure of insecurity about the value and future of the work.

They also mention the dichotomy between engaged and what they call escapist orientations but don't make any statement that I could find about how the work they evaluated and selected falls into the two categories. However the impression that I got from looking through the book is that only about a quarter of the artists are clearly engaged in the conventional sense, whether in terms of social issues or personal ones. The rest are, if not escaping from reality, at least viewing it from a distance.

Over half the artists show no people at all, and some (according to the descriptions) have actively removed people from their pictures through digital means. Of those who do show people a majority do so in a deadpan style, and a number "artificalize" their subjects through techniques ranging from compositing to distortion to shooting clay figures.

So this is what the book is. Is it something you would want to buy? If you are interested in what's going on in the top art schools (or was as of a few years ago), then probably yes. If you just want to see a lot of interesting work, then the answer depends on your tastes. Yours may be different from mine (I have only been actively involved in photography for about a year), but here are some artists in the book that I think are especially worth looking at:

* Raphael Dallaporta (France): exquisitely beautiful pictures of land mines paired with factual descriptions of the devices - chilling
* Idris Khan (England) : compelling extreme multiple exposures - he stands out in the book as showing a highly distinctive and well developed style
* Mieke van den Voort (Netherlands): living spaces left by people who died alone - the ultimate in trace/aftermath photography
* Pablo Zuleta Zahr (Chile, studied in Germany): lots of composite pictures of people dressed alike - a little gimmicky but very well executed
* Marco Bohr (German, studied in Canada): subtly insightful documentary photos of Japanese city life
* Ted Partin (US): real pictures of real people, intimate, black and white - really stands out in the book.

A number of other artists had a picture or two I liked even if I did not go for the whole series. Two of my favorites among these are Bianca Brunner (Switzerland) untitled (p. 53) and Chih-Chien Wang (Taiwan) Newspaper Wrap (p. 209).

I personally loved this book, but I don't think everybody will, so I give it just four stars.