In From Life, Overton blends the patient, meticulous, clear-eyed archival research we might expect from a professional historian with the subjective and intimate familiarity of the memoirist to offer a complete and comprehensive portrait of his subject ... Provides an excellent introduction to new readers who may have first encountered Berger through the recent rerelease of G. For the already initiated, From Life draws useful connections between Berger’s myriad projects, explores the surrounding context from which they arose, and teases out through lines that remained consistent across his lengthy career ... Makes a concerted effort to weave the diverse threads of Berger’s work into a single, cohesive tapestry without smoothing out its multitextured richness.
Exuberant ... Thick with detail and lit by wonder. It strains to paint the whole canvas and give us the man in full, warts and all ... Overton is a writer in part because of reading John Berger. The biographer’s prose style is his own but he writes in the same spirit – fired by curiosity and close-marking his subject; gesturing out to the reader as though to engage them in debate.
Well-informed, if over-fond ... Overton slips into the second person, addressing Berger directly and a little too cosily ... Overton’s biography, despite its tonal missteps, is valuable for bringing this visionary critic back to life.
Tom Overton was the archivist at the British Library charged in 2010 with overseeing Berger’s donated archive. He is obviously a brilliant archivist; he isn’t, yet, such a good writer. Basic narrative scaffolding is sometimes missing, meaning too much leafing backwards and forwards to piece events together ... Overton is very good on Berger’s fascinating parents, a deracinated Jewish father and ambitious, accomplished working-class mother. I was glad to have read the book for those chapters alone, but as a fully fledged, measured assessment of Berger’s life, achievement and place in history it falls short.
There is a feeling of fluidity to this book, of dialogue, of it moving towards John while leaving an opening for the reader to move with it, with the possibility of all, biographer, subject (or subject’s reputation), and reader, being changed in the process ... From Life is an apt title. A drawing from a photograph is flat, abstract, virtual, a collection of details rather than possessed of the unity of a living face. A drawing from life is the record of an encounter ... I did not agree with, or understand, everything in From Life. Some passages, just a few, seemed a draft short of clarity.
