[A Fortunate Man is] a beautiful book, beautifully written, and illustrated with [Jean Mohr's] striking, movingly apt photographs. Its beauty should occasion no surprise because it is a long, thoughtful essay on man….

The fortunate man is Dr. John Sassall, a country doctor by choice, in a depressed English country setting. The place may not matter, in the ordinary sense, since the relativity of human experience is accentuated. However, the evocative prose and the pictures do not so much complement the scenes and episodes as give pure visual expression to the heard and spoken words….

Berger has undertaken to evoke two levels of humanity in his long, somewhat rambling essay: the country doctor, and a country doctor. Sassall, a country doctor, comes through more strongly than the genus, particularly since the photographs of the grim parish he serves and its moody parishioners command our attention even when the...