As if Borges and Didion took a tour with Sebald through the beauty and terror of our present and past, Look Out is a profound and prismatic investigation of taking the long view.
Look Out is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging perspectives—from pre–Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest. Blending history, reporting, personal experience, and accounts of activists, programmers, spies, astronauts, artists, inventors, and dreamers, Edward McPherson reveals that to see is to control—and the stakes are high for everyone.
The aerial view—a position known in Greek as the catascopos, or “the looker-down”—is a fundamentally privileged perspective, inaccessible to those left on the ground. To the earthbound, (in)sights from such rarified heights convey power and authority. McPherson casts light on our fetishization of distance as a path to truth and considers the awe and apocalypse of taking the long view.
Reviews
“A charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the ‘aerial view’ … McPherson makes an elliptical and enchanting case for reinserting wherever possible the ground-level, human perspective … Redolent with insights into the ethical quandary of history-making, as well as the author’s own sense of awe at the full sweep of the human story, this is a wonder.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Look Out is a gift in what it demands from a reader which is, quite simply, attention. In form, in approach, and in topic, the book is rich, hyperfocused, and overwhelming in its generosity. To read this is like having a tour guide through a life you did not know you could experience.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
“High flying and impressively grounded . . . An exhilarating and urgent reckoning with human perspective.”
—Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
About the author
Edward McPherson is the author of three previous nonfiction books: Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat (2004), The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats (2007) and The History of the Future: American Essays (2017). He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, Tin House, the American Scholar and many others. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and the Gesell Award from the University of Minnesota, where he received his MFA. He is a contributing editor of The Common Reader and teaches in WashU’s Creative Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.