NCW Libraries

Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism,...

A collection of essays celebrating the cultural heritage of history and home argues that arrogance must be abandoned in favor of respect and care for oneself, one's neighbors, and the land. In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his fifty-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities. The writings gathered...

"The Need to Be Whole continues the work [Berry] began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: the wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others. Without historical understanding of this practice of dispossession--the displacement of Native peoples, the destruction of both the land and land-based communities, ongoing...