I did appreciate the parts describing the families, the horrible condition of their poverty, but I've never been a reader to lean towards the poetical. There are chapters where Agee mixes prose and poetry. ( )

This was a must read as a documentary photographer. Started in college but finished reading years later. ( )

I can't honestly give this book a rating, or even much of a review. I found it irritatingly pompous and condescending -- to the readers, that is. Other readers may find it interesting, though.

James Agee is a famous American novelist. This book however does not belong to his creative oeuvre. Instead, it is a sociological description of abject poverty in the United States during the 1930s in the aftermath of The Great Depression. With photographer Walker Evans Agee visited and documented the lives of poor Americans. The book is the ultimate example of observation and description, providing meticulously detailed description of every aspect of these people's lives. Perhaps the art of this type of writing has been made superfluous as photography and film seem to capture an even more lively impression, although film can barely convey the description of the smell of stale sweat. I assume few people will take the time to read this volume. The language is at times poetic. Oddly interspersed with seemingly irrelevant parts, the book is definitely not just a sociological study, but should be read as a type of artistic prose. ( )

This book was as difficult to rate as it was to read, which is to say, quite difficult.

In an effort to deepen my sense of place, I've been trying to read books that are set in Alabama and/or written by Alabama authors. I'd heard this book was a milestone in journalism, that it broke the rules and is still regarded as a dazzling opus for its braiding together of detailed factual reporting, complex prose narrative, and poetic inner reflection. And all that’s true. James Agee, who often places himself as a character in his descriptions of three white Alabama sharecropping families during the Dust Bowl, captures simultaneous feelings of guilt, disgust, compassion, and awe toward impoverished people and their lifestyles, feelings that weren’t being publically articulated at the time. Now, any magazine reporter with a byline has license to wax philosophical about the subject of an assignment; but in 1936, Agee was an anomaly. Walker Evans’ photographs further elucidate the baffling dichotomy of toughness and tenderness in sharecropping families.

All of that should earn the book four or five stars.

But it took a blessed eternity to read. And a lot of that reading was slogging through. As important as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is (and as much as it expanded my knowledge base and deepened my sense of Alabama), on the whole it’s not a super enjoyable read. (At least not for a library-book borrower like me who needs to start and finish a book in one go, not dabble in it a bit at a time.) Ergo, three stars. ( )