International bestseller
The book based on the multi-media show is an international
bestseller.
In Scandinavia
it sold per capita the
equivalent of 3 million copies in America.
In Germany "Bilder aus America" was the longest
running foreign book on the bestseller list ever.
In its personal and gripping
tone many teachers in anthropology, sociology and political science find
it an important tool "to help bring human life to the teaching"
of their students.
High lights from
the book
In this illustrated odyssey of 800 photos, the bulk in
color, Jacob Holdt describes his experiences at the Wounded Knee uprising,
with drug addicts in "shooting galleries", and in projects with
welfare mothers.
He also depicts the
friendships he developed with transvestites and transsexuals; the violence
and murders he witnessed; his own arrest by the FBI; and his startling
encounters with the opposite extreme of American society, including Jay
Rockefeller and Ted Kennedy.
A
modern Jacob Riis
The book is a forceful reminder that the poverty and inhuman
living conditions which were so brilliantly exposed a hundred years before
by Holdt's fellow Dane, Jacob A. Riis, in his classic study, "How
the Other Half Lives," continue to exist.
The book is self-published
by American Pictures Foundation in order to enable the homeless or the
actual people portrayed in the book to sell it.
The book is now sold
out since I - the author - lost too much money selling it that way. The
Danish version was in 2016 updated to Obama and waits for an American
publisher to re-publish it in But you can read his online version here:
Read
an online copy of the book here
Read it here as a Flipbook
or
download it as a pdf
Or read my memoirs "On saying yes" about how I young
and naive arrived in America and ended
up making it.
