WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP by Michael Lesy...

WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP by Michael Lesy (Anchor: $16.95). Michael Lesy combines late-19th-Century photographs from a recently discovered archive with excerpts from contemporary newspaper accounts to paint a grim portrait of turn-of-the-century life in small-town Wisconsin. The striking photographs, taken by Charley Van Schaick between 1890 and 1910, capture the spectrum of late-19th- Century existence: birth, marriage, amusements, work and death (often premature). Lesy uses this material to argue that the unremitting toil in mines, lumber mills and farms often drove men and women to madness, murder, arson and suicide. The local papers did report numerous instances of murder and arson, but Lesy fails to document their accounts; nor does he balance these grim stories with the satisfied and fulfilling lives that some of the citizens undoubtedly lead. The result is a curious polemic, more useful for artists and students of photography than historians.