Name: Edward McPherson - Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
Start: 2025-10-21T18:00:00-05:00
Location: 399 N Euclid Ave, St. Louis, MO, United States, Missouri 63108

Edward McPherson - Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
Presented by Left Bank Books & the Left Bank Books Foundation
Join us to help celebrate St. Louis author Edward McPherson for the launch of his newest highly celebrated book Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View. 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.
" 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
McPherson will personalize and sign copies after the presentation! Personalized and signed copies will be available to be mailed anywhere in the country. For personalized copies, please order before noon on October 21st.
Join us at Left Bank Books
399 N. Euclid Ave
St. Louis, MO 63108
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About the Speaker
Edward McPherson is the author of Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat, The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats, and The History of the Future: American Essays. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, among other awards. He teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.
About Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
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.