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A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural
Award-winner Wendell Berry€™s second collection of essays was first published in 1972, and contained eight essays, including the seminal “Think Little,€ which was printed in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue and reprinted around the globe. The splendid centerpiece of A Continuous Harmony, “Discipline and Hope,€ is an insightful and articulate essay of instruction and caution. This volume contains original content, with only slight revisions as might be desired. It gives readers the opportunity to read the work of this remarkable cultural critic and agrarian, and to delight in the prose of one of America€™s greatest stylists.
182 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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378 people want to read
About the author
Wendell Berry
288 books4,840 followersWendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
July 21, 2025
“Think Little” and “Discipline and Hope” are for sure two of the best essays I’ve ever read. I thought these essays were beautiful, compelling, challenging, and also incredibly practical.
The tenor of all of his essays sees to be “give, don’t take”. I often think about this in relation to communities and people, but Berry extends this to our entire earth. He convinced me to think deeply about when I think it’s good and normal to just consume/take and to reevaluate if there is a different way of living that is characterized by giving- to our earth, to others, to our communities, etc.
The tenor of all of his essays sees to be “give, don’t take”. I often think about this in relation to communities and people, but Berry extends this to our entire earth. He convinced me to think deeply about when I think it’s good and normal to just consume/take and to reevaluate if there is a different way of living that is characterized by giving- to our earth, to others, to our communities, etc.
October 11, 2021
A gorgeous series of meditations on how we are inextricably bound up with the natural world, and on the double meaning of culture: the way we care for the land and the way we care for humanity. Although parts of these essays are dated or shortsighted fifty years later, Berry’s clear vision of a sustainable agri(cultural) future remains compelling and challenging.
September 11, 2025
“hope lives in the means not the end. art does not survive in its revelations, or agriculture in its products…or faith in its relics”
November 29, 2019
We are all supposed to love Wendell Berry, to coo like a swaddled baby when his name is mentioned. There is something about him that, to me, is like a sleeping pill. It’s not that he is awful, not at all. It’s that I find him boring, his writing lifeless. This book was no exception. I was overwhelmed by someone who seems to be in love with his own words, the sound of his own voice, and who meanders toward a goal that rarely becomes apparent to me.
January 4, 2024
Berry says some nice, thought-provoking things in this collection. And he also says some stupid stuff, at least in my opinion. I realize we are now 50 years removed from these essays, but some pieces of them do NOT hold up well with time. I think I need to come back to this after some time to see if it that changes my view
April 9, 2015
The first chapter was a real disappointment for me. It is Berry's statement against religion and that we must throw off religion in order to live well with nature. He goes on for quite a while, is very clear in his feelings, and I mostly settled for reading the poetry of other writers that he references in that chapter. Now I am scanning the rest of the book with some feeling of my own. He has so much great stuff, important stuff, to say. But to throw out the healing arts because so many doctors you meet are horrible at healing is just sad. It seems so below Berry's usual standards to fall for that stereotype. Even great thinkers sometimes fall for spoon fed dogmas, I guess. We are all beggars, after all. We often beg from the poison when we think we have the fruit.
August 24, 2023
Summary: A collection of essays representing a cross-section on Berry’s critique of America’s consumptive culture as well as his ideas on good agriculture.
I suspect I am not the only one who thinks that all of Wendell Berry’s essays are just variations on a theme. But two things make “variations on a theme” either banale or briliant–the beauty of the theme and the skill of the composer. In the case of Berry, the theme is the utterly essential theme of living well in our place–our own patch of land, our community, our country, our planet. The variations include the disciplines that have shaped how we live in our place, the need to think little and local, the illusions of our industrial dreams, and the value of literacy and the importance of the language that we use.
The main entrée of the collection is an eleven part extended essay titled “Discipline and Hope.” Berry considers the various expressions of the industrial, exploitive disciplines of our technology–our focus on efficiency, consumption, the ways we abstract from the practical realities of the land. He contrasts our linear vision of progress with the cycles of birth, growth, fruit, decline, and death by which the earth is renewed each year. He calls for us to embrace at-one-ment.
He lays the basis for this in his opening essay, “A Secular Pilgrimage,” observing the seeming hatred of the creation by those professing belief in the Creator of all things, contrasting it with the testimony of “secular” nature poets who viewed the world with awe. This is followed by the appetizer of “Absence and Return,” in which he describes returning home from the West Coast and the renewed awareness as he walks his land that “everything is supposedly named and numbered and priced, are unlikely to know what lies out of sight of the paved roads.” Then we have a “sweet” essay paying tribute to another of those nature poets, William Carlos Williams, whose work he describes as “a sustained and intricate act of patriotism in the largest sense of that word.”
The final two appetizers offer complementary tastes, perhaps salad dishes, around the idea of thinking local in “The Regional Motive” and “Think Little.” The latter essay first appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalog and challenges the slogan to “Think Big.” He contends that while we are organizing trash cleanups, we need to pick some up ourselves, turn off lights, lower the thermostat, and refuse to buy the latest electric gadget, and grow some of your own food. “The Regional Motive” challenges our nomadic drive with one that stays home and lives in a way that preserves land for those who follow us.
Following the main essay, Berry offers two desserts that leave the taste of the whole meal with us. One, “In Defense of Literacy” argues for the practicality of literacy and the awareness of the importance of the words we use to describe what Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginary.” The other, “Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise” illustrates with the strip mining of Kentucky the philosophy playing out throughout the country of narrow measures of efficiency and profit that do not account for the people displaced, the soil polluted, the rivers ruined that cost as much or more to restore as the profits of the companies who inflicted these losses without requiring them to repay.
What is served up here is a wholesome country meal of Wendell Berry essays. Admittedly, some of the cultural references are dated, but people have turned up their noses to the hearty meal, preferring industrial fast food, as it were, to the wholesome messages in these essays. So, while the cultural references are dated, the underlying truths are not, and if anything, more desperately needed today. Everyone is still looking for technological fixes to our climate crisis that will allow us to preserve our consumptive lives. We have not heard Wendell Berry’s message calling us to a different way of living in our world, to a wholesome feast that is in “continuious harmony” with the life of our world.
I suspect I am not the only one who thinks that all of Wendell Berry’s essays are just variations on a theme. But two things make “variations on a theme” either banale or briliant–the beauty of the theme and the skill of the composer. In the case of Berry, the theme is the utterly essential theme of living well in our place–our own patch of land, our community, our country, our planet. The variations include the disciplines that have shaped how we live in our place, the need to think little and local, the illusions of our industrial dreams, and the value of literacy and the importance of the language that we use.
The main entrée of the collection is an eleven part extended essay titled “Discipline and Hope.” Berry considers the various expressions of the industrial, exploitive disciplines of our technology–our focus on efficiency, consumption, the ways we abstract from the practical realities of the land. He contrasts our linear vision of progress with the cycles of birth, growth, fruit, decline, and death by which the earth is renewed each year. He calls for us to embrace at-one-ment.
He lays the basis for this in his opening essay, “A Secular Pilgrimage,” observing the seeming hatred of the creation by those professing belief in the Creator of all things, contrasting it with the testimony of “secular” nature poets who viewed the world with awe. This is followed by the appetizer of “Absence and Return,” in which he describes returning home from the West Coast and the renewed awareness as he walks his land that “everything is supposedly named and numbered and priced, are unlikely to know what lies out of sight of the paved roads.” Then we have a “sweet” essay paying tribute to another of those nature poets, William Carlos Williams, whose work he describes as “a sustained and intricate act of patriotism in the largest sense of that word.”
The final two appetizers offer complementary tastes, perhaps salad dishes, around the idea of thinking local in “The Regional Motive” and “Think Little.” The latter essay first appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalog and challenges the slogan to “Think Big.” He contends that while we are organizing trash cleanups, we need to pick some up ourselves, turn off lights, lower the thermostat, and refuse to buy the latest electric gadget, and grow some of your own food. “The Regional Motive” challenges our nomadic drive with one that stays home and lives in a way that preserves land for those who follow us.
Following the main essay, Berry offers two desserts that leave the taste of the whole meal with us. One, “In Defense of Literacy” argues for the practicality of literacy and the awareness of the importance of the words we use to describe what Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginary.” The other, “Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise” illustrates with the strip mining of Kentucky the philosophy playing out throughout the country of narrow measures of efficiency and profit that do not account for the people displaced, the soil polluted, the rivers ruined that cost as much or more to restore as the profits of the companies who inflicted these losses without requiring them to repay.
What is served up here is a wholesome country meal of Wendell Berry essays. Admittedly, some of the cultural references are dated, but people have turned up their noses to the hearty meal, preferring industrial fast food, as it were, to the wholesome messages in these essays. So, while the cultural references are dated, the underlying truths are not, and if anything, more desperately needed today. Everyone is still looking for technological fixes to our climate crisis that will allow us to preserve our consumptive lives. We have not heard Wendell Berry’s message calling us to a different way of living in our world, to a wholesome feast that is in “continuious harmony” with the life of our world.
May 30, 2021
I'm glad I read this book.
I picked up Wendell Berry at the suggestion of my cousin and the impetus of a personal discipline to read an essay every day. The essays in "A Continuous Harmony" are a half century old. They seem as relevant an ecological treatise today as they were in the long-ago seasons of Earth Day and sprouting of the EPA to save a groaning Earth. Berry knowingly cautioned against Ecological activism becoming a fad like Civil Rights and the Antiwar Movement had become.
I remember Earth Day. I remember the Cuyahoga River catching fire and a thick, brown smog hanging like a shroud over LA and the broken shells of eagles' eggs threatening to erase our National emblem irrevocably. There were as many battles lost as won, but we began a tentative healing process environmentally before the regulation-bound beasts of exploitative profits began thrashing against their chains.
The book fills me with Hope and Despair. Hope that as bad as the current moment seems we have survived equally critical moments of environmental crisis. Despair that in so short a time we've taken our eye from the Prize and are still wrestling with issues inherent in a culture built on consumption and waste.
I picked up Wendell Berry at the suggestion of my cousin and the impetus of a personal discipline to read an essay every day. The essays in "A Continuous Harmony" are a half century old. They seem as relevant an ecological treatise today as they were in the long-ago seasons of Earth Day and sprouting of the EPA to save a groaning Earth. Berry knowingly cautioned against Ecological activism becoming a fad like Civil Rights and the Antiwar Movement had become.
I remember Earth Day. I remember the Cuyahoga River catching fire and a thick, brown smog hanging like a shroud over LA and the broken shells of eagles' eggs threatening to erase our National emblem irrevocably. There were as many battles lost as won, but we began a tentative healing process environmentally before the regulation-bound beasts of exploitative profits began thrashing against their chains.
The book fills me with Hope and Despair. Hope that as bad as the current moment seems we have survived equally critical moments of environmental crisis. Despair that in so short a time we've taken our eye from the Prize and are still wrestling with issues inherent in a culture built on consumption and waste.
August 21, 2025
"Wendell Berry's passionate theme in these essays is the relationship of humanity to the earth and all its creatures. He approaches his subject with the good sense of an organic farmer, the eloquence of a poet, and the clarity of an inspired teacher.
"In A Secular Pilgrimage and i>A Homage to Dr. Williams Berry writes affectionately of other poets who are concerned with the natural world. In the already famous essay Think Little, which appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalog, he suggests sensible ways to combat the madness of consumerism. In Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise, a polemic that has been read into the Congressional Record, he speaks out against the devastation caused by strip mining. and in the extended essay Discipline and Hope he draws together his perceptions about the crises that confront our society. A Continuous Harmony confirms that Wendell Berry is the most articulate voice for ecology in America Today."
~~back cover
This was a pleasure to read, to immerse oneself in Berry's eloquent language and thoughtful insights. I resonated with every word.
"In A Secular Pilgrimage and i>A Homage to Dr. Williams Berry writes affectionately of other poets who are concerned with the natural world. In the already famous essay Think Little, which appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalog, he suggests sensible ways to combat the madness of consumerism. In Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise, a polemic that has been read into the Congressional Record, he speaks out against the devastation caused by strip mining. and in the extended essay Discipline and Hope he draws together his perceptions about the crises that confront our society. A Continuous Harmony confirms that Wendell Berry is the most articulate voice for ecology in America Today."
~~back cover
This was a pleasure to read, to immerse oneself in Berry's eloquent language and thoughtful insights. I resonated with every word.
January 17, 2023
Berry is a powerful writer and rhetorician; his arguments have the feeling of rightness and even certainty, despite Berry's own repeated emphasis on humility and mystery as guiding values and behaviors.
I agree with so much of what Berry writes, but there's something off-putting about his essays in A Continuous Harmony that I just can't pinpoint. They're 50+ years old, yes. But that's not it. I find myself feeling judged when I read Berry's stuff, and I come out looking really bad. I don't know where, exactly that feeling comes from—something Berry writes or implies, or doesn't write, or simply from inside me. But once I feel judged, I read defensively and with an eye to find fault, as if to elevate my self, lowered by this perceived judgment, by undercutting Berry's positions and life commitments.
But then I take that necessary step back and keep trying. There's SO much of value here.
I agree with so much of what Berry writes, but there's something off-putting about his essays in A Continuous Harmony that I just can't pinpoint. They're 50+ years old, yes. But that's not it. I find myself feeling judged when I read Berry's stuff, and I come out looking really bad. I don't know where, exactly that feeling comes from—something Berry writes or implies, or doesn't write, or simply from inside me. But once I feel judged, I read defensively and with an eye to find fault, as if to elevate my self, lowered by this perceived judgment, by undercutting Berry's positions and life commitments.
But then I take that necessary step back and keep trying. There's SO much of value here.
March 31, 2023
First things first, Wendell Berry is that lovable grump, the one who you know you can set off by casually mentioning some modern day fad, and then sit back and be entertained by his delightful, articulate and long winded rant.
I love a good grump about the sorry state of the world every once in a while and this one was also insightful, interesting and made me pause to think on many occasions.
That being said, I was both reassured and deflated by the fact that this book is over 50 years old, but the sentiments, and critiques could have been written today (there are a few dated comments, but fewer than you would expect). Not that I expected much progress, but the timelessness of this was unsettling at times.
Overall, a good book if you want to feel intellectual, despair at the state of the world, and also feel like there is a sliver of hope if people step up and decide to take care of each-other (even if it is unlikely).
I love a good grump about the sorry state of the world every once in a while and this one was also insightful, interesting and made me pause to think on many occasions.
That being said, I was both reassured and deflated by the fact that this book is over 50 years old, but the sentiments, and critiques could have been written today (there are a few dated comments, but fewer than you would expect). Not that I expected much progress, but the timelessness of this was unsettling at times.
Overall, a good book if you want to feel intellectual, despair at the state of the world, and also feel like there is a sliver of hope if people step up and decide to take care of each-other (even if it is unlikely).
November 3, 2022
I didn’t enjoy all of the essays, because I sometimes had a hard time getting into the essays because I didn’t know what point he’s trying to make at the beginning, so I skimmed over a few. However, I felt that I learned about the author in Notes from an Absence and a Return. I greatly enjoyed Think Little as it speaks to how we need to walk the talk in environmentalism and social causes by focusing locally, even hyperlocally in our own homes. Discipline and Hope makes many good points about the pursuit of meaningful work and the deification of “the economy”. In Defense of Literacy was quite short and to the point while Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise relates closely to earlier essays and brings the ideas to a specific place.
September 8, 2022
I feel inadequate to describe the words of Wendell Berry. Everything he writes is gold to me in one way or another. In the instance of his non-fiction, even if an essay seems like it isn't totally relevant to me, I can walk away from reading it with some nugget to ponder or quote to copy down.
Harmony in the title of this book is just perfect. Wendell emphasizes the harmony of nature, God and people as His creation in such meaningful ways. He never shies away from telling it like it is and from attempting to point us back to true harmony.
Harmony in the title of this book is just perfect. Wendell emphasizes the harmony of nature, God and people as His creation in such meaningful ways. He never shies away from telling it like it is and from attempting to point us back to true harmony.
September 2, 2023
Please read WB everyone!!!! Ugh. You will likely be more depressed by the state of our land and soil - Byron was quite right when he said knowledge brings pain. But, you will also hopefully hold more delight and respect for the land that we live in - that was given to us, though we have recklessly and ruthlessly destroyed it. I am 100% of part of the “we”. Hoping that my personal convictions will lead to better “Discipline and Hope”.
June 19, 2024
Wendell Berry is great. The last essay in this collection is a piece on the horrors of strip mining in eastern Kentucky. While I agree wholeheartedly that strip-mining was an is an ecological disaster, I wonder if he would change his perspective a bit if he revisited it now. Many of the areas of eastern Kentucky that were strip mined have become some of the best elk habitat in eastern North America. Out of the ashes of Gehenna an Eden can grow through the Grace of God.
May 12, 2023
a really genuine take on how to love the land regeneratively as a disciple of Christ and a citizen of heaven.
January 20, 2017
No one is more timeless than Wendell Berry.
December 15, 2019
More dry than my usual reading, but has some great insights on various topics.
Some quotes I liked:
Quoting Ammons: "I know nothing; still, I cannot help singing . . . ." (page 32).
"A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with" (page 75).
"We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own" (page 79-80).
Quoting Edward Dahlberg: "We are fatalists only when we cease telling the truth, but, so long as we communicate the truth, we move ourselves, life, history, men. There is no other way" (page 92).
"Real efficiency is long-term efficiency" (page 94).
"Meaningless wok must produce meaningless leisure. The freedom from work must produce not leisure, but an ever more frantic search for something to do" (page 119).
"I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can learn to give themselves a value" (page 122).
"Free men are not set free by their government. Free men have set their government free of themselves; they have made it unnecessary. Freedom is not accomplished by a declaration. . . . freedom is a personal matter; though we may be enslaved as group, we can be free only as persons . . . A person can free himself of a bondage that has been imposed on him only by accepting another bondage that he has chosen. A man who would not be the slave of other men must be the master of himself- that is the real meaning of self-government" (page 129)
"The present problems of the world are the result, not of human stupidity, but of human intelligence without adequate cultural controls" (page 132-133).
"There is a unity in the creation, and that the behavior and the fate of one creature must therefore affect the whole, though the exact relationships may not be known" (page 156).
"The ultimate discipline, then, is faith: faith, if in nothing else, in the propriety of one's disciplines. . . . if one's faith is to have any public validity or force, then obviously it must meet some visible test. The test of faith is consistency . . . between principle and behavior. A man's behavior should be the creature of his principles, not the creature of his circumstances" (page 157).
"One of the Confucian ideals is that the 'archer, when he misses the bullseye, turns and seeks the cause of the error in himself'" (page 168).
Some quotes I liked:
Quoting Ammons: "I know nothing; still, I cannot help singing . . . ." (page 32).
"A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with" (page 75).
"We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own" (page 79-80).
Quoting Edward Dahlberg: "We are fatalists only when we cease telling the truth, but, so long as we communicate the truth, we move ourselves, life, history, men. There is no other way" (page 92).
"Real efficiency is long-term efficiency" (page 94).
"Meaningless wok must produce meaningless leisure. The freedom from work must produce not leisure, but an ever more frantic search for something to do" (page 119).
"I see it teaching my students to give themselves a price before they can learn to give themselves a value" (page 122).
"Free men are not set free by their government. Free men have set their government free of themselves; they have made it unnecessary. Freedom is not accomplished by a declaration. . . . freedom is a personal matter; though we may be enslaved as group, we can be free only as persons . . . A person can free himself of a bondage that has been imposed on him only by accepting another bondage that he has chosen. A man who would not be the slave of other men must be the master of himself- that is the real meaning of self-government" (page 129)
"The present problems of the world are the result, not of human stupidity, but of human intelligence without adequate cultural controls" (page 132-133).
"There is a unity in the creation, and that the behavior and the fate of one creature must therefore affect the whole, though the exact relationships may not be known" (page 156).
"The ultimate discipline, then, is faith: faith, if in nothing else, in the propriety of one's disciplines. . . . if one's faith is to have any public validity or force, then obviously it must meet some visible test. The test of faith is consistency . . . between principle and behavior. A man's behavior should be the creature of his principles, not the creature of his circumstances" (page 157).
"One of the Confucian ideals is that the 'archer, when he misses the bullseye, turns and seeks the cause of the error in himself'" (page 168).
September 7, 2015
Wendell Berry is an author I read regularly. Not exactly like taking a vitamin, but I need his perspective, the challenge of his thought on various topics, the pace of his life, his connection to land and community. This book was no exception. I am nearly to the point that I need to stop reading library copies of his books and just buy my own. I want to underline and write in the margins too often (and perhaps am too lazy to start copying quotes, as there would be WAY too many). I appreciated the essays entitled "A Secular Pilgrimage" and "A Homage to Dr. Williams", both of which are about poetry, its ability to reveal aspects of life and nature that cannot be described otherwise. "Think Little" was yet another challenge to me to be mindful of how I live. This book was published in the early 70s, and he was responding to the times as they were, and I often wished I could have had his updated perspective. But then I suppose all of his subsequent work is just that! Probably the best quote is in the essay "In Defense of Literacy": "I am saying then, that literacy -- the mastery of language and the knowledge of books -- is not an ornament, but a necessity." Just as true today as then.
September 4, 2014
Through the years, especially recent ones, I've come in passing contact with the writing of Wendell Berry. A quote here, a poem there, an essay on occasion. I'm not sure why it took me so long to make a point to read a Wendell Berry book since I've always been impressed and touched by what little I've read.
For those who are already fans of Berry, there is nothing that I am currently capable of saying that will shed more light on this, or any, of Berry's writings. For the uninitiated I would simply say that Berry's insights are of a sort that the whole planet would benefit if we all read and pondered essays such as these. During the course of these essays Berry touches upon such topics as nature poetry, spirituality, education, politics, farming and ecology, and much more. His world view is one that is consistent, well worth contemplating, and exceptionally well written. I can't say that this collection should be everyone's starting point but I can say that everyone should acquire a starting point - start reading Wendell Berry now!
For those who are already fans of Berry, there is nothing that I am currently capable of saying that will shed more light on this, or any, of Berry's writings. For the uninitiated I would simply say that Berry's insights are of a sort that the whole planet would benefit if we all read and pondered essays such as these. During the course of these essays Berry touches upon such topics as nature poetry, spirituality, education, politics, farming and ecology, and much more. His world view is one that is consistent, well worth contemplating, and exceptionally well written. I can't say that this collection should be everyone's starting point but I can say that everyone should acquire a starting point - start reading Wendell Berry now!
December 7, 2015
One of those amazingly prescient books, where you find yourself turning back to the copyright page to confirm that the book was indeed written in 1970(!) and not yesterday - or tomorrow. It is interesting to note that we are still riding the same waves that were rising high already forty years ago - that our world and societies are, far from "new and improved" as we insist more and more shrilly, very much riding along the ever rising crest of the wave of all things' commodification, instrumentalization, fragmentization, effictivization, abstraction, consumption, etc. Wendell Berry makes a most soulful and literate plea for us to collect and connect ourselves - back to one another, to the land, to death, to abandonment and mystery.
The book consists of eight essays of varying length - the four that are excellent ("A Secular Pilgrimage", "Think Little", "Discipline and Hope" and "In Defence of Literacy") more than make up for the missability of the others.
The book consists of eight essays of varying length - the four that are excellent ("A Secular Pilgrimage", "Think Little", "Discipline and Hope" and "In Defence of Literacy") more than make up for the missability of the others.
July 23, 2007
My favorite essay was "Notes from an Absence and a Return." I am in a transitional place in my life and have been thinking a lot about the sort of life I want to lead. Perhaps because of that, this book seemed particularly poignant. It is wise and inspiring and manages to feel both deadly serious and light at once.
July 12, 2015
Wendell Berry impacts me deeply yet again with this collection of essays. It is sad that every one of these, written in 1971 or before, is just as pertinent (more so really) as they were then. There is a lot of work to be done, and he provides some clear solutions and starting points. His topics focus on literacy, morality, farming, ecology.
January 17, 2009
Classic. Very well considered, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. Written in the early seventies and yet still entirely timely -- which is a bit depressing for the contemporary reader sympathetic to Berry's principles. Makes one yearn to go back and reread "Walden". Great collection.
September 20, 2013
Wonderful and simple essays offering profound political insights through a man who has exacted his own sense of love and discipline through his devotion toward land and community. It's both exhilarating and challenging in its unraveling of so many cornerstones of American culture.
Currently reading
July 30, 2008A prolific writer! Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc. Such a story teller.
March 25, 2012
Read this book.
Probably has had the most profound effect on my perception of the world of any of the books I have read since Jack London.
Probably has had the most profound effect on my perception of the world of any of the books I have read since Jack London.
September 20, 2015
Real talk from Wendell Berry.. Endlessly applicable to today's economic, environmental, and community challenges.
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July 26, 2020Somewhat uneven collection, especially at the start, but the long chapter "Discipline and Hope" is one of Berry's best.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews