Some of the works of John Berger, principally the films on which he has collaborated with Alain Tanner, the Swiss film-maker, are better known to an American public than John Berger himself or the works that are his creation entirely. Since the early 1950s, when he began to report on the art scene in London for the New Statesman, he has been an increasingly visible presence in Great Britain, mainly because of his work with independent television and later because of the programs he did for the BBC, some of which, as videotapes, have become standard fare for secondary students in schools throughout the United Kingdom. His standing as a novelist was enhanced by the controversies which eddied around his novel, G., when it was first published in 1972 and won the Booker Award, believed by some to be Britain's most prestigious prize for fiction. Throughout his career as a teacher, art critic, television commentator, novelist, and scenario-writer, Berger has been a dedicated and open Marxist who has used his writings to bring into high relief the tensions, dramas, and disappointments of life in the modern world. Berger has tried to keep his investigations as free as possible of ideological clutter while adhering to a particular ideology which he sustains out of a belief that, if human existence does not make sense on a global scale, or if it cannot be made to make sense on such a scale, then men will live in chaos with themselves and with others. There is nothing especially novel about such an observation. What is noteworthy about Berger is the intensity of his personal effort to study the chasm between the ideal perceived and reality attained and to propose possible ways of bridging it. Because of that, his writings revive a tradition not much honored in recent generations