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Noah is Currently Reading

Noah Richards is currently reading

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

bookshelves: other, currently-reading

Reading for the 3rd time

read in April 2025

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Noah Richards said: " 10/10 absolutely brilliant!
This is definitely a hard book to review, really each of the 30 plus essays deserve a full review. And I would probably need to re-read this many times to do that... which is not a half bad idea actually.
So here are just a 10/10 absolutely brilliant!
This is definitely a hard book to review, really each of the 30 plus essays deserve a full review. And I would probably need to re-read this many times to do that... which is not a half bad idea actually.
So here are just a few thoughts:
Berry is one of the best writers alive. He writes with clarity, brevity, weight, humor, charm, urgency and sometimes sass. One thing in particular which stood out to me was his ability to craft stunning or beautiful or even haunting final lines to all of his essays. This is such an underrated art form. Several of these literally made my daw drop, audible exclaim.
I really enjoyed "Why I am Not Going To Buy A Computer" and it's follow up "Feminism, The Body, And The Machine". He is at his most sarcastic and sassy in these because it includes several letters writing in critique of the first essay followed by his responses to these letters. It was quite enjoyable to read... and it made me wonder if computers are really all that necessary for everyday life. (to be fare is suppose I am his idea reader on this topic in particular. I am very primed and predisposed to agree with him)
"A Few Words For Motherhood" is one of the simplest and shortest, and yet it just about brought me to tears listening to it while I stocked potatoes at Trader Joe's.
I could go on and on, but I will limit myself to two more brief comments.
1. I felt that this collection was slightly unbalanced. It was heavy on the "world ending fire" type of polemical essay focused on environmentalism (Berry would hate being lumped into an "ism" but I digress). It left me wanting more of the poetic story driven essays like the one on motherhood i mentioned above, or the first two essays "A Native Hill" and "The Making of a Marginal Farm" or the final essay "The Rise". This I think is where he is at his best, and I want more.
2. I have some a general critique of his overall argument for saving the environment. (Even as I write this, I am fearful that Wendell would somehow see this and then he would make a fool out of me, destroying my critique. But alas I am comforted to remember that he still does not have a computer...)
My critique is simple, probably too simple. It seems to me that Wendell has too high a view of natural human virtue. What I mean by that is an ability to do what is objectively right, apart from grace. He writes extensively about the wrongs and evils committed by people and the implicit complicity of the majority of the population in these evils. And yet he still calls on us societally to do the right thing. Maybe I am just too cynical but I seems naive to expect or even hope for this type of societal change. Humans have always been the same, it is only because of technological advances in the last 200 years that we have been able to expand our destructive habits to a global scale. I am sure he would have a well thought through answer to this but I have not seen it in anything of his that I have read. It seems to me that he is well read enough in the Gospels to see that we can't hope to fix this one ourselves. We need new creation. ...more "

Sep 12, 2025 03:34PM · see review