What Are People For?: Essays by Wendell Berry

What Are People For?: Essays Reviews

• 
  Sara

  I read this with my book club, but most people didn't finish it because they were too confused by the format and bored with the first two sections so they quit before it got good. This book is excellent, but an orientation is in order...
  
  Part 1: The shortest section. It's poetic, almost proverb-esque. Interesting, but a little strange.
  
  Part 2: This consists of several essays Berry wrote about people several decades ago, none of them you will have heard of. If this bores you, skip it. After those, there's a chapter about a poem (if you don't like poetry, skip this too). The essay "Style and Grace" is about the novel "A River Runs Through It" and is definitely worth reading; same goes for "Write and Region" which is about "Huckleberry Finn".
  
  Part 3: Pure gold. This is Berry at his finest, defining our culture's illnesses and casting vision for the future. The essays here are loosely organized around the themes of community, human dignity, work and consumerism. This section could serve as a great introduction to Berry's thought and work for a new reader.
  
  My absolute favorite essays are:
  
  What are People For?
  Economy and Pleasure
  The Pleasures of Eating
  Why I'm Not Going to Buy a Computer
  Feminism, the Body, and the Machine
  Word and Flesh
  
• 
  Josh Barkey

  A collection of essays. A series of meditations. An alternate path. I LOVE this guy, even as I resent him for revealing to me my complicity in this deranged culture, and the necessity in my life for real, deep change.
• 
  Libby

  gotta love this farmer-philosopher.
  
  
  “When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be -- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” --wendell berry
  
  
  
  
• 
  Dan

  What are People For? by Wendell Berry
  
  There are seventeen essays in this collection and a small number of pages of poetry.
  
  Berry is an excellent essayist and I consider the essays on Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey to be the gems here. Both are five stars easy. Berry understands these men and writes so eloquently and reverently of their humanity and even their flaws.
  
  His essays that are most specific or narrow in subject matter and about people are the best. Some of the others like the Responsibility of a Poet or a Practical Harmony felt too general or philosophical.
  
  4 stars. A solid collection of essays from the well noted author in the genre of Regional Environmentalism. Glad I read it.
• 
  Laura Clawson

  Favorites from this collection: Waste, The Pleasures of Eating, and Feminism, The Body, and the Machine.
• 
  John Elliott

  Having previously read Berry’s Port William novels, it was compelling to see his views come to life with even greater precision and force in essay form. While provocative, his takes on conservation, economics, and technology are imminently well thought (and lived) out. Especially enjoyed the essay entitled “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”, of which I have included an excerpt:
  
  “The higher aims of ‘technological progress’ are money and ease. And this exulted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in ‘the future’. How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say.”
• 
  Deborah Stevens

  This is my first (not last!) foray into Berry’s nonfiction. There is much to appreciate here- particularly his independence of thought.
• 
  Anima

  ‘ From the imperfections of life, one could take refuge in the perfections of art. One could read a good poem- or better, write one.
  [..]
  There is a sense in which I no longer “go to work.” If I live in my place, which is my subject, then I am “at” my work even when I am not working. It is “my” work because I cannot escape it.
  
  If I live in my subject, then writing about it cannot “free” me of it or “get it out of my system.” When I am finished writing, I can only return to what I have been writing about. While I have been writing about it, time will have changed it.
  
  Over longer stretches of time, I will change it. Ultimately, it will be changed by what I write, inasmuch as I, who change my subject, am changed by what I write about.’
• 
  Letitia

  I actually finished this book more than a week ago, but I am only just reviewing it now because I continue to feel ambivalent about it. For one thing, as a collection of essays, I find that some are deeply meaningful and have personal significance, but others are dry, irrelevant (either due to being dated or too specific), or misguided in their objective.
  
  Wendell Berry is not an eloquent writer, but he is a good one, in that his message is clear and his words convey a beautiful simplicity that one expects to find in a self-named "regional writer" who identifies first and foremost as a farmer. His content, however, suffers from the seemingly incurable malignancy of being a progressive white male who truly believes he is woke. I read this work with sympathy, with openness, trying to understand him in the context of the state in which I live (Kansas), of a dying way of life (non-industrial agriculture), of a man who sees the pitfalls of technology as well as their merit. But in the end I can't quite manage to agree with him that things were more beautiful and simple the way they were. He misses structures and systems and oppressive cultural norms due to the myopia of his own life.
  
  I found the most commonality with Berry in his rants against economic imperialism, as he bemoaned the death of the Earth, of his anger at the politics that drove men like him to poverty. In his essay Economy and Pleasure, he had a particularly insightful section on competition, in which he says, "If one is willing to take another's property or to accept another's ruin as a normal result of economic enterprise, then he is willing to destroy that other person's life as it is and as it desires to be. That this person's biological existence has been spared seems merely incidental; it was spared because it was not worth anything. That this person is now "free" to "seek retraining and get into another line of work" signifies only that his life as it was has been destroyed." The wisdom of his words is a beautifully crafted burn against "The American Dream", an ideology against which he and I struggle in futility.
  
  But then on the other hand he'll delve into, and double-down on, truly problematic viewpoints. In defending his use of wife as secretary who types up his manuscripts, in his efforts to eliminate race from consciousness, he misses the point. It really hits home when, in the Word and Flesh essay he claims: "...though we have been talking about most of our problems for decades, we are still mainly talking about them. The civil rights movement has not given us better communities. The women's movement has not given us better marriages or better households. The environmental movement has not changed our parasitic relationship to nature."
  
  Hold up, say what? My marriage (in which I include my first marriage which ended in divorce, specifically BECAUSE of the women's rights movement), is definitely better, and the work in my household is unquestionably more equitable. I'm not sure if he's opining lack of action behind ideals, which I get, or if he's waving a nihilistic white flag of surrender to things as they are.
  
  So in the end, there is certainly fodder for thought and discussion here, and I think for someone that seeks to have a greater perspective of the disenfranchised rural community (which is specifically why I read this), there are a few essays within that contain great wisdom. But it's definitely not an overall masterpiece, and I don't think Berry's words should be taken whole cloth without serious consideration of his position as a straight, white male living in the middle of the 20th century.
  
  
• 
  John

  Wendell Berry has a perspective, and it contrasts with much of what passes today as common sense or regular living. Berry, a farmer, novelist, and poet, cares deeply for the land. He holds a long view, not looking to increase the land's productivity for short-term gain, but to care for it in a proper fashion, one borne out of generations of experience, leaving both land and the creatures that live upon it healthier than they would otherwise be. Berry's concern for the environment (from Kentucky, he has seen the damaging results of strip mining), lead him to related concerns about the economy, community life, and novel technologies. That Berry is even asking questions about our need for the latest and greatest technologies flies in the face of general practice today. That he was asking these questions 25 or 30 years ago, before cultural products became even more disposable than they were then suggests the need for voices like Berry's, then and now.
  
  The introductory essays on damage and healing set the tone for the book. Berry sees the damage all around. He lives to heal that damage in his small corner of the world. Reading the book as something of an exhortation, Berry would be keen to see his readers take up his cause, even if the results were only evident in their own homes. The middle section combines several book reviews, which are really more meditations on themes addressed in those books. The final section combines about ten essays on the environment, economics, and community. Of these, "God and Country," which deals with the relationship between Christianity and ecology, and "Economy and Pleasure," which deals with the ascension of free-market economics and the guiding principle of competition, are the real standouts for me. These two essays are not simply brilliantly written, they also express a compassionate and community-oriented view of big economy and big religion that we cannot hear enough about.
• 
  Aaron

  And when?
• 
  Marcella Chatham

  I was very pleasantly surprised with this read. The book is comprised of 3 parts.
  The first two parts Berry talks about poetry and a few stories about different people (seemed either about different writers or fellow farmers). It's a little bit of a trudge to get through the first two parts if you're not super interested or knowledgeable about poetry. There were a few good nuggets in there but generally, it was a little boring. I don't know much about poetry (yet) so I feel like I couldn't really appreciate what he was talking about.
  
  And then you get to part 3.
  
  The sheer amount of mic drops my dear Wendell Berry writes in the third part was MOOORREEE than enough to make up for the first half of the book. Berry says the hard things everyone else is thinking but is too afraid to since its against current culture. Although the book was published over 30 years ago, we're in an even deeper pit than Berry wrote about then.
  I wish I could pick one favorite essay but I literally can't. His passion against big agriculture, big food, and feminism helps root his clear love for local household and community economies. I think, if anything, it just confirmed everything I've been feeling about where we get our food, our pleasures of eating, family and community.
  
  A couple quotes I really love (and there are so many more where they came from):
  
  "Even so, if one wishes to save anything not protected by the present economy - topsoil, groves of old trees, the possibility of the goodness or health of anything, even the economic relevance of the biblical tradition - one is a part of a remnant, and a dwindling remnant too, though not without hope, and not without the necessary instructions, the most pertinent of which, perhaps, is this, also from Revelation: 'Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die.' "
  
  "Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. “Life is not very interesting,” we seem to have decided. “Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.” We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work to “recreate” ourselves in the evenings, and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation - for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast food joint hellbent on increasing the “quality” of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world."
  
  "Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which the rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other."
  
  "They assume - and this is the orthodox assumption of the industrial economy - that the only help worth giving is not given at all, but sold. Love, friendship, neighborliness, compassion, duty - what are they? We are realists. We will be most happy to receive your check."
  
  Read the physical copy from our local library.
• 
  Davey Ermold

  I agree with another reviewer on here: the second section can be laborious to work through, but section three is one delightful essay after another.
  
  Berry has this knack for carving his own path. His philosophy, his worldview is consistent and humble. Whether one agrees with him or not, reading his essays gives one insight into the spectacular simplicity of country life, and draws one to consider if we shouldn’t be looking to go back.
• 
  Simon

  Berry's intelligence shows in these essays. They should come with a disclaimer though: All his thinking relies on assumptions based on christianity and a farming lifestyle: Family is the highest aim of life, nature has a will, purpose and value outside of consciousness, bodily labor is the essence of humanity impoverished by technological aid, and so on. If you don't agree with those, you might not like some of his ideas.
  
  Another useful disclaimer is that Berry has a few essays about farmers, writers and other people that most probably don't know, which makes essays about them of little immediate use.
  He also tends to repetition, you can sum up most of his ideas in this book in a couple pages. And somehow, i felt like i didn't really learn much that i didn't know before in these essays, except in the one about poetry or literature.
  
  On the other hand, some of his ideas about life are refreshing because they are so unfamiliar to big city dwellers, and might show them critical issues in their life like the waste problem. And the clear, philosophically precise form of his arguments makes pretty much the best version of them given his assumptions. I study computer science, but his argument for not buying a computer is sound and well put and i agree that for his current purposes it isn't necessary, though it might help him improve his farming at some point.
  
  Berry shows how destructive mass production can be, how technology doesn't always improve life and comes at a price, how we are seduced by consumerism and vulgar entertainment. He even gives practical advice on how to improve our relation to food even as city people.
  But i feel a collection of essays should be more densely packed with ideas and less biased, otherwise essays turn into christian magazine columns, and Berry's own bias of world view is only too clear.
• 
  E.

  I first encountered Wendell Berry in freshman English at OBU. The essay we read seems to be in this volume, "Word and Flesh" (at least this essay makes the same points I remember from 1992). At the time I disagreed with him, particularly that problems, including environmental problems, cannot be approached globally but can only be addressed locally.
  
  I came back to Berry near the turn of the millennium, when I read his poetry and fell in love. The poetry invited me into the essays, and Berry has been one of the most significant influence on my thought.
  
  But his ideas are rarely easy for me. In fact, they are quite difficult. He is not a writer I read for confirmation of my own ideas, but to convict and challenge me. Whenever I read him, I am reminded of my hypocrisies and moral failures.
  
  Back in 2004 I considered following Berry's advice and abandoning my life and career and moving to a poor small town to become a teacher and grow much of my own food. I didn't do that. I came out, and gay life led in a very different direction. Though I did have friends who did something of the sort.
  
  It is exciting in 2017 to see Berry's influence for good upon our culture--the local food movement, more sustainable agriculture, more awareness about food ethics, the various craft movements, etc.
  
  This is one of the essay collections I had long planned to get to. It seems particularly apt in our Age of Trump, even if the essays are from the 70's and 80's. What Berry was warning us about has come to fruition.
  
  I marked up this volume like my adolescent Bible. I will return to it often.
• 
  Jenifer

  The first collection of essays by Wendell Berry I read was Sex, Economy, Community, and Freedom. It's a good thing too, because those essays were easily accessible and, for someone steeped in the current mindset of Organic and Sustainability, pretty easy to agree with.
  This collection was more challenging, although because of that I should probably give it five stars. It is likely the parts that made me the least comfortable that I should be most grateful for.
  The format is clever - he begins with a series of book reviews, which by way of example begin to answer the book's title question. One in particular, on Edward Abbey, is a meta-critique, setting the reader up to question their assumptions about Berry himself and whether they might have already placed him in a box, atop a high pedestal. The rest of the essays that follow damn near dare you to knock it clear off.
  Many fine and provocative points are made, but this one perhaps sums the book up best:
  "The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do."
• 
  Lmichelleb

  I haven't met with writing by the inimitable Wendell Berry that didn't strike a deep chord in me. Novel, poems, essays: they are all earthy and sharply piercing, delivering wisdom to the places desperately needed in my own soul.
  
  This collection of essays surprised me. I think I expected to be a bit bored by them. The second half of the collection particularly had me leaning in to not miss a thing, but the whole was excellent. Berry is honest, often brutally so, but not in an unkind way, and often taking part in accepting blame for the problems he sees. I love his idea that rebuilding love of place and local community is how and where we can bring healing to our people and our land. This is an especially important message to ponder during this COVID pandemic. Would and could this have happened on such a scale were we more locally focused communities, diligently caring for our own land and people? How would the impact be different? Food for thought...
• 
  Drew

  Berry is an Old Testament prophet, irascible and unyielding. Committed to nature, a simple life, manual labor and grudging use of automobiles and airplanes. Environmentalist of the highest order--full of integrity. Some of the essays take perseverance to finish, but worth it. He paints a bleak, realistic picture, but not one without hope.
• 
  Brandon Rodriguez

  "The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner."
  
  Full of wisdom, see my kindle highlights!
• 
  Miles

  Wendell Berry is an author I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. As a staunch defender of the environment and nonindustrial agriculture, Berry challenged my parents’ generation to think twice about the price of American modernity. This collection of essays from the 1970s and 80s does just that, and in much richer terms than the reductive cost-benefit analyses that often pass for solid thinking in economics. This book still has lots to offer 21st-century readers; despite some noteworthy points of disagreement, I was impressed with Berry’s intelligence, wit and infectious passion for the natural world.
  
  One has only to dip into this collection––which contains both literary essays and works of cultural critique––to discover that Berry has little regard for the standards of contemporary American life. He vilifies all sources of centralized, industrial power (private and public), whose goals he sees as indisputably orthogonal to those of the small communities and farms that form the backbone of a healthy society. He is especially concerned with the loss of “local knowledge,” which can only be discovered and maintained by people living in a particular place over long periods of time:
  
  "[It is] a kind of knowledge, inestimably valuable and probably indispensable, that comes out of common culture and that cannot be taught as part of the formal curriculum of a school…the kind of knowledge, obviously, that is fundamental to the possibility of community life and to certain good possibilities in the characters of people. Though I don’t believe that it can be taught and learned at a university, I think that it should be known about and respected in a university…It is certainly no part of banking or economics as now taught and practiced." (119)
  
  If this seems like a “fuzzy” definition of knowledge, I think Berry would count that as a compliment. One of Berry’s best qualities is his devotion to arguments and ideas that cannot be quantified, and will therefore have no champions except those who muster fine rhetoric in their defense.
  
  Local knowledge is impossible to define outside the context of a particular place and people, but anyone can intuitively understand what it is. Whether urban or rural, rich or poor, humans bodies contain information in the form of memories, stories and habitual behaviors. The vast majority of this information cannot be reproduced in a lab or survey, and is a completely unique product of how that individual navigates his or her environment.
  
  "A human community…must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself––in lore and story and song––that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related." (154)
  
  The same general principles are true of land, plants and nonhuman animals; the interchange between these various evolved repositories of information is far too complex to comprehensively track or analyze. In short, ecology is really, really complicated.
  
  Because it defies the standards of “objective” knowledge utilized by governments and capitalist economies, local knowledge has been marginalized and often extinguished by the forces of nationalization and globalization. As Berry sees it, local communities “have been invaded by the organizations” of modernity, which replace local knowledge with a “hegemony of professionals” that “erects itself on local failure, and from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and as a source of ‘raw material,’ human and natural” (163-4). Cities, the bastions of professionalization, develop a vampiric relationship with the surrounding countryside, siphoning nutrients and intelligent individuals away from rural communities.
  
  Berry sums up the problem with devastating accuracy:
  
  "As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized salestalk, entertainment, and education. This loss…has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper “prices of progress,” or made the business of folklorists." (157)
  
  Given that these trends were evident long before the 1970s and have continued relatively unabated, it is hard to disagree with Berry that we are witnessing the death knell of rural communities across America. It is easy to disagree, however, with his sentiment that all interventions into local communities by outside influences are necessarily destructive. Berry does not level with his readers about the distinct dangers of locality. Local cultures can be vibrant, quirky and rich in character, but they can also be petty, bigoted and ignorant of anything beyond the immediate horizon. Some information is universal, at least in terrestrial terms. Gravity and antiseptic work the same in Kansas as they do in Bombay. As Thoreau said, “the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction” (
  Walden, 108).
  
  The idea that external entities have nothing of value to offer local communities isn’t just untrue theoretically and practically, but also historically. Contrary to Berry’s lopsided view, the march to modernity has been a mixed bag of miracles and calamities. Human history is bloodied by our tribal heritage, and one of the important functions of the state and the market is the creation of systemic partitions between communities that might otherwise be at each other’s throats.
  
  The “price of progress” is not incontestably a deficit. Should the “local knowledge” that African Americans were inferior to whites in the American South have gone unchallenged by the federal government during the Civil Rights movement? Should we accept practices like female genital mutilation because they represent the “local knowledge” of small African communities? Should we cast off our aspirations of providing all Americans with affordable healthcare because doing so might require a national rather than a local solution? If diagnosed with a rare illness, should I reject the expertise of an urban doctor because she is not a member of my rural community?
  
  Most troubling is Berry’s willingness to romanticize small-scale farming and thrust it forward as the best possible way of achieving harmony with nature.
  
  "The idea that we should obey nature’s laws and live harmoniously with her as good husbanders and stewards of her gifts is old…It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun." (108)
  
  This is backwards. If we’re going to make appeals to antiquity, we should remember that, “Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology” (
  Sapiens, 74). Like it or not, the plundering of nature is humanity’s default setting; it does Berry no good to deny this. Better to admit that the idea of stewardship is a relatively new one (which he doesn’t), and then go on to make a worthy case for it (which he does).
  
  It’s also crucial to remember that agriculture as we know it is only ten thousand years old, and is in no way a “natural” activity for humans. Our bodies are not evolved for the repetitive manual labor that farming requires. Farm work is damned difficult, even for folks who choose it, and we shouldn’t be surprised when people want to make a living doing something else––for good reason. Even a global or national shift back to local, “sustainable” farming (if there truly is such a thing) wouldn’t be a panacea.
  
  Though his language and arguments are crisp as a cloudless morning, Berry’s voice trembles with the fury of a lost age, one whose hope of resurrection fades with every passing day. For all his undeniable wisdom, Berry is cantankerous and does not respond well to criticism (as evidenced in one of the essays containing reader feedback). Nearly all of the cultural and economic trends bemoaned in this book have continued since these essays were first written, indicating that humanity has entertained Berry’s grievances only long enough to shiver at our sins before settling back into a life where comfort trumps responsibility. This should not surprise anyone. It’s the choice we’ve always made: to take all we can get before the other guy shows up, and then blindly defend “our ground” against all challengers (or, more recently, coerce someone into defending it for us).
  
  I do not wish to imply that particular individuals or groups need to embrace this unsavory ethos to have a good life, nor that it is impossible to cultivate a harmonious and ethical relationship with the natural world. My critiques of Berry aren’t meant to degrade him or deny the value of his perspective. I am trying to be realistic. And realistically, there are some great ideas in this book that ring true today and will for a very long time, I suspect.
  
  Berry emphasizes that we’re all complicit in bringing about current eco-catastrophes:
  
  "Our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom––a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom––and all of us are involved in it." (127)
  
  This is a hard truth to admit, but the upside of doing so is the acknowledgment that we’re all in this together. If everyone is a part of the problem, everyone is potentially part of the solution. And when it comes to solutions, Berry has a terrific message. Rejecting the mentality of “planetary” solutions, which “describe a problem in such a way that it cannot be solved,” Berry implores us to “care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others” (198, 200).
  
  I don’t think most people are categorically opposed to planetary solutions for environmental destruction, but I also don’t think many of us are in a position to design such solutions, or bring about their implementation. But most people have a home, and maybe a yard. Some people are even lucky enough to live in communities that have managed to plug into the modern world while still retaining a strong sense of local identity, as I do. The importance of tending our homes and lands is profound; we needn’t go anywhere to start making a difference.
  
  Berry might want to travel back to a time when small towns and farmers didn’t have to deal with the rest of the world, but that is fantasy. The great wide world is riddled with human faults, but I still don’t want to give up my connection to it, and I don’t think doing so would improve my life or my land. We don’t need to reject modernity, but we do need to acknowledge that current paradigms are besotted with centralized power structures that rely too heavily on “objective” knowledge that serves the ends of amoral, capitalist economies of scale. There has to be a bigger seat at the table for people who “tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love” (210).
  
  There is a new dialectic forming between local communities and the global village, one in which we can all participate. The conversation is well underway. You may not hear about it on the news or see it on your morning commute, but it’s all around you. Your starting point is the earth beneath your feet.
  
  This review was originally published on my blog,
  words&dirt.
• 
  Karen

  This collection of essays was organized in three parts. Part I was a combination of little sentences, almost stream on consciousness, not quite poetry. When I tried to read this section, on damage and healing, I almost gave up. I was confused by what I was reading. I couldn't connect to it.
  
  I don't like to give up on books, so I skipped on to Part II, which was a collection of essays on other writers' works. Reading these essays felt a little like school assignments, but I liked the subject matter. I felt compelled to going.
  
  The essay, entitled "Writer and Region" was an in-depth review of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. One of the themes prominent in most of Wendell Berry's essays is the importance of community. He noted that "no community can survive that cannot survive the worst." The other essay that I liked was entitled "Style and Grace." The essay compared Ernest Hemingway's short story "Big Two-Hearted River" with Norman Maclean's story, "A River Runs Through it."
  
  Part III was a collection of essays focused on the condition of the world in the 1980s. Mr. Berry clearly cares about the environment, family-owned farms, the economy, and nature resources. In my opinion, his essay "Economy and Pleasure" was the single most important essay in the book, one that anyone who cares about the environment should probably read. In his view, our economy is based on the concept of competition, forcing the division between winners and losers. I didn't feel half as strongly about the other essays in this section. In fact, I almost didn't finish. But I kept going in the hope that I would find another gem. Unfortunately, I didn't.
  
  I will try to read other books by Wendell Berry because other writers have mentioned his writing more than a few times. This book has put me in the mood to read about the importance of staying close to the land and appreciating the world we live in. I think I will read Barbara Kingsolver's
  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life again before I read another Wendell Berry book.
• 
  Aaron West

  In a world where partisanship is eating away at the already frayed fabric of our country, Berry argues that the best political solutions from the right or left amount to a giant bandaid on deep-rooted cultural, social and spiritual problems that require whole new ways of being and thinking. A true conservative of the best sort, Berry advocates for the preservation and perpetuation of truth, beauty and goodness without compromise and without the blind-spots and hypocrisy of today's "conservative" pundits. Both curmudgeonly and winsome at the same time, Berry is a one-of-a-kind cultural prophet who - like the prophets of old - has been consistently ignored and proven right time and again. I'm not sure the world or the life Berry advocates for is even conceivable in the lives of most Americans today. One can envision a Pixar's Wall-E scenario playing out when the Earth is reduced to mountains of refuse, someone stumbles across an old, dusty copy of Berry's essays and quietly nurses a seedling rising from the trash into a garden, discovering once again the need for humans to steward the land and love their neighbor. I hope it doesn't have come to that...
• 
  Robyn

  Discounted | Not the place to start with Berry. | I see so many of the 4 star reviews that start with the caveat that much of this collection can be skipped and won't be enjoyed. For me, there wasn't enough of the rest to raise my rating. I will try more of his nonfiction, not only because I already own another of his books, but if I hadn't read so much about him, this collection would have closed the door on my interest. It's as if, when preparing for publication, an editor told Berry to grab any piece of paper from his filing cabinet, regardless of age, topic, or quality, and they would stick most of it at the beginning. In my edition, some book reviews are not identified as such until their second page, so the reader spends the first chunk of the essay confused about what they're reading. Some of the opinions expressed as fact have not aged well, and the thoughts they lead to therefore don't ring as true as they would if they hadn't been grounded by uncomfortable introductions. I really wanted to love this, but instead I'll try a different piece of his work.
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  Katherine Oakley

  For people who have never read Wendell Berry before: start with the Whole Horse. But if you’re already open to his thoughts, then this book is an eclectic mix. It has a bit of something for everyone, but I think that the first two essays, “What Are People For,” and “Waste” are really the must reads.
  
  I doubt anyone would read this book and agree with all of it, but that’s what makes Wendell Berry such a unique thinker. His perspective on the world is grounded in physical agrarian experience, and so it’s not easily classified in the political and academic spheres. But even the essays I disagreed with I gained something from, and most importantly I was reminded of the truth that always comes to light when reading Wendell Berry: that to live tied to place and land is a delight, and that denying ourselves that is one of the substantial tragedies of modern western (colonial) life.
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  Misael Galdámez

  If you’re ready to feel complicit in an economic system that is wasteful and destroying our world, read some Wendell Berry. He is unflinching in his view of industrialization, and sometimes, it’s enough to make you wonder how it’s even possible to live in harmony with the created world. I agree with the reviewer who said that Part III is the best part of the book. I’ll have to re-read these, but “God and Country” and “Economy and Pleasure” were among my favorites.
  
  “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
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  Katie Bliss

  This was a group of essays by Berry, the first of which were almost book/author reviews, and these were my favorite parts. He is so well-spoken/written, and I actually got some great ideas of books and authors to check out this next year, which is exciting. His other essays spoke about various topics, but the main theme is how can humanity be of benefit to the earth. Berry is a huge proponent of not doing unnatural things to the earth, animals, etc. to just make more money or save time - rather, learn to communicate with these environments and situations and do what is necessary to promote balance and mutual respect.
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  Austin Spence

  I enjoyed the collection of essays from "The World Ending Fire" more as they dealt with a broader sense of philosophies on agriculture, environmentalism, and sociology. While a few of the essays were in both collections, this one included more literary critique and feedback on some contemporaries of Berry at the time, in the realm of nature writing. Berry is still my most trusted voice in starting small and growing into oneself in a community, then the world. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and revelations that come from his time in a local economy, and the breakthroughs he receives while working the land.
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  Beth

  
  
  In this collection of essays written in the 80s, Wendell Berry passionately conveys his concerns with the way America is headed. The first section contains poetry mainly about farming and the land. The second section has a more literary focus as he reviews several literary works/authors. The third section is more about the American economy and greedy consumerism. While Berry’s tone can feel disparaging towards the average American consumer, I think he also offers hope in his solutions to the problems. Regardless, these essays certainly give you much to ponder.