Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #881886 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Synopsis
This popular collection features six essays on sustainability and stewardship from one of Americas most important cultural critics. Provocative, intimate, and thoughtful, Another Turn of the Crank reaches to the heart of Wendell Berrys concern for our nation, its communities, and their future.

Customer Reviews

Preaching to the Choir
I'd never read Berry before, but as far as I can tell, this brief collection of six essays and lectures sticks to familiar territory. However, it's probably not the best entry point for people who are newcomers to his realm. There are two related problems with the book: one of presentation, and one of tone. The problem with presentation is that the pieces are so short that there's no room for specifics. So, while one might be more or less in accord with the broad strokes of Berry's vision, there's no detail to back it all up. The problem with tone is that from the very first page the reader feels like they are being lectured at. Of course, some of the pieces are lectures, but there's a certain condescension that runs throughout the book. It comes out when Berry uses certain words such as the three As of "appropriate", "authentic" and "adequate". When these are used ( as they often are), there he's obviously made some kind of value judgment, but the reader is never let in on it. The end result of the two flaws is that the reader feels like a hectoring argument is being made without any supporting logic -- which ultimately smacks of preaching to the choir.

Which is unfortunate, since I tend to agree with Berry on a lot of things (though not his anti-abortion stance). Small farms are good, agribusiness is bad, stewardship of the land is good, extraction industries are bad, treating the body as an organic whole is good, and things of that nature. Alas, he has a tendency of making sweeping assertions and accusations that are far too simplistic and shrill to be useful. Two examples from the first 15 pages will suffice to illustrate: "This is a world in which the cultures that preserve nature and rural life will simply be disallowed." and "Communists and capitalists are alike in their contempt for country people, country life, and country places."

Berry also succumbs to the trick of creating straw men to counter his theses. For example, in one essay, he claims that conservationists are people who want to simply preserve land in a pristine, untouched state, and that's all. While there are certainly some conservationists who feel that way, they are a small minority of a a much larger community who actually is in almost total accord with Berry's views on stewardship and land use. It certainly doesn't help matters that his view of small-scale farming appears to be heavily tinted with rose-colored glasses. His claims that modern agribusinesses has rendered the small farm economically unviable sounds like a reasonable proposition. However, it ignores the fact that, historically, small scale farming ran on the thinnest of margins, was subject to all kind of external instability (weather, vermin, etc.), and operated on only slightly better than a subsistence level. In farming, cash is scarce, that's why people abandoned it in droves whenever the opportunity presented itself, such as in WWII, when all those defense-industry factories were opened in California. (Of course, in Berry's vision, you don't really need cash, because you barter for everything you need from your neighbors.)

Berry's exhortations to create small-scale communities is worthy stuff, and even in cities people are creating this. The growth of CSAs, farmers markets, and the like in the past decade is a tangible indicator of this. However, to achieve the large scale results Berry seeks requires a more rigorous roadmap than what is provided in this slim collection.

A must read!
As a long-time fan of Wendell Berry, I was expecting a something thought provoking. I underestimated him. In this collection of essays Berry has gone beyond his usual high standard to write something utterly transcendent. I place it squarly in the same league as Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" and Walker's "Winter Wheat" for beauty of prose, story-telling and quality of instruction. The essays are thoughtful, spiritual and finally, telling - about where we are, and where we could be. After enjoying Berry for years, this one caused me to send him a thank you note for writing it. This one is a keeper!