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Buk-Swienty, Tom. The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008. 349 pp. $27.95.
The author of this book, like the subject about whom he so eloquently writes, is from Denmark; yet, as he mentions in the preface, he had never heard of Jacob Riis until he was a Danish exchange student at the University of California-Santa Barbara. "It was 1989, and I was taking an American history course on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. . . . The professor spoke at length about a Danish American journalist, one Jacob Riis, who had been one of the first muckrakers . . . and had written a groundbreaking book about the deplorable living conditions in New York City's tenements called How the Other Half Lives." Tom Buk-Swienty discovered that Riis was relatively unknown in his native country and, desiring to learn more about him, read his book and then saw his photographs in a museum. He purchased Jacob A. Riis: Photographer &...