The collaborative effort of photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, portrayed the lives of three sharecropper families in the South during the Depression, giving witness to the tyranny of the tenant farming system that enslaved some nine million tenants in 1936. Their book was at once poetic, scathing, compelling, and tragic. Fifty years later, Maharidge and Williamson have revisited, photographed, and interviewed the surviving members and descendants of the Gudger, Ricketts, and Woods families shown in that book. There are so many lives in this saga that it is difficult to keep everyone straight, and the many stories of hardship caused by cotton and the struggle to leave it behind feel less like document than fiction. A fascinating work, nonetheless.-- Ann Copeland, Drew Univ. Lib., Madison, N.J. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information