The World-Ending Fire

February 5, 2018
Berry’s graceful essays have long been models of eloquence, insight, and conviction, as Kingsforth’s selection of some of his most important pieces reminds readers. Berry’s writings traverse topics from agriculture to economics, but always circle back to the values of a small, local economy and to the wastefulness fostered by corporate greed. In a 2011 speech, Berry proclaims, “Our fundamental problem is world destruction, caused by an irreconcilable contradiction between the natural world and the engineered world of industrialism.” In “The Total Economy,” Berry names neighborhood and subsistence the main features of a local economy. In one of his most famous essays, 1989’s “The Pleasures of Eating,” he declares eating “inescapably an agricultural act” and proposes seven ways of eating responsibly—e.g., “participate in food production to the extent that you can” and “learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home”—that look ahead to today’s local food movement. Since all of these essays are readily available elsewhere, Berry’s fans won’t find anything new, but newcomers will find the works exceptionally timely, and the book as a whole a thoughtful introduction to Berry’s writing.

March 1, 2018
A pleasing selection of essays from the lifelong farmer and award-winning writer.It's a wonder that Berry (The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, 2017, etc.) gets any work done on his Kentucky farm given his prodigious literary output. He has written hundreds of essays, and English author Kingsnorth has carefully selected 31 of them, published from 1968 to 2011, to represent the "essential" Berry. Key words in the essay titles signal Berry's ongoing concerns: nature, work, rugged individualism, citizenship, and agriculture. Throughout, he promotes caretaking, faith-keeping, kindness, and peace. In the introduction, Kingsnorth notes, "soil is the recurring image in these essays." In 1989, Berry wrote, "we persist in land-use methods that reduce the potentially infinite power of soil fertility to a finite quantity, which we then proceed to waste as if it were an infinite quantity." The author champions the "renewal of rural communities," which must be accomplished "from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home." In a fine piece on regional literature, Berry laments Twain's conclusion to Huckleberry Finn, which "fails in failing to imagine a responsible, adult community life." Instead, he pines for the "beloved community" of Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. Berry also argues fiercely that "illiteracy is both a personal and a public danger." Literacy, he writes, "is not an ornament, but a necessity." Though the author is generally fairly somber, his 1987 essay explaining why he won't buy a computer reveals a sly sense of humor: "If the use of a computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one."A great place to start for those who are not familiar with Berry's work; for those who are, it will be a nostalgic stroll down a rural, wooded Memory Lane. In this day and age, his writings are must-reads.

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Starred review from April 1, 2018
Wendell Berry's admirers?a loyal band several generations deep?may blink at the subtitle of this selection of his essays. Essential? What's not essential? To read or reread these pieces is, however, to warmly affirm editor Kingsnorth. Berry is the philosopher and the prophet of agriculture, community, stability, and friendship, and there is nothing sentimental or utopian anywhere in his advocacy of those things. Rather, he is humbly empirical; read the four pages of journal-entry-like paragraphs called Damage, the report of a failed project on his own farm and its lessons. He is precise about America's great delusions; read the three-page Rugged Individualism, which in passing and in a nutshell counters Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission six years before that case was decided. Turn to that profound diagnosis of organized misuse of the land, The Unsettling of America, and to its quarter-century-later sequel, The Agrarian Standard. Proceed to Berry's review of the literary correlative to that unsettling Writer and Region, with its striking insights into Mark Twain's success and failure in Huckleberry Finn. When the going seems to be getting heavy, try A Few Words for Motherhood, centered on birthing a calf, or The Rise, on being in a canoe on a suddenly risen big river. There is much more, all, yes, essential.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)