Wooden Churches: A Celebration
Intended for mass consumption, this disappointing collection of 152 duotones of simple rural churches is being baldly marketed as the spiritual and commercial successor to the publisher's best-selling Out on the Porch: An Evocation in Words and Pictures (1992). The present formulaic work opens with a feel-good, get-right-with-God childhood reminiscence by journalist Bragg. Predictably, photos by Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee, and others (identified and dated only in the credits at the end) are unnaturally yoked to passages of mostly Southern fiction, with scant sensitivity to context, content, or artistic and authorial intention. While both the photos and the excerpts are evocative on their own, these lightweight, even interchangeable pairings fail to convey the complexities of rural religious expression and architecture. Of limited library appeal beyond compulsory regional interest and small libraries that may lack adequate representation of primary texts and photos.ARussell T. Clement, Univ. of Tennessee Lib., KnoxvilleCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.