"What gives Gardner's book its kick, its emotional and intellectual impact, are his meditations, short essays in boldface type, at the opening and closing of The Impulse To Preserve. Gardner allows us to consider that the worlds he has filmed so beautifully were disappearing as his camera rolled... Gardner has, as the poet Charles Simic says in his introduction, refused to accept the discord between reality and imagination. He has been in the real world fully imagining, and this book is part of what he brought back." William Corbett, The Boston Phoenix

"Robert Gardner is an anthropological filmmaker who has for four decades balanced on a tightrope between the sensibility of the artist and the discipline of the ethnographer. This is his memoir of that extraordinary feat. . . . Turning the pages, we come across some of the iconic images in ethnographic film as well as apercu of light and line that hold their own artistic truth." Arthur Kleinman, author of The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition

The Impulse to Preserve can be ordered from Harvard University Press.