The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture | 
| Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Sierra Club Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 8836
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 246
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0871568772
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.10973
EAN: 9780871568779
ASIN: 0871568772
Publication Date: November 1, 2004
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Amazon.com
The mid-20th-century environmental crisis that led to important protective legislation in the 1970s, is, to poet/farmer Wendell Berry's mind, also a crisis of character, agriculture, and culture. Because Americans are divorced from the land, they mistreat it; because they are divorced from each other, they mistreat those around them. Berry, writing in a prophetic mode, argues that if Americans are to heal the environmental wounds their land has suffered, they will also need to create more meaningful work, sustain happier and healthier lives, and return to what conservatives call "family values." The Unsettling of America is a quarter century old now, but most of its arguments remain current.
Product Description
Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 50 word sentences, and dry. - December 31, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
As I read this book, I agree with Berry on many points, the evolution of householder into consumer, and agriculturist into corporate farming.
In fact much of what we see to today that drives small farmers off the farm is the drive for more. Corporate interests in the guise of Ted Turner, ConAgra, ADM are sucking up huge quantities of midwestern lands either to create a communist utopic buffalo ground or a rape the farm ground to produce Ethanol.
Berry at times is difficult for a simple farm kid to follow. While the message is important, it is lost in the verbiage.
I'd suggest a re-write for an audience that does not consist solely of post-doctoral candidates.
 One of the greatest books I have ever read. October 26, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Wendell Berry says everything I feel and everything I have thought since I was a child growing up in S. Calif. watching the beautiful land be consumed ruthlessly by development. There is something wrong with todays ways, and I can't put it to words, but thankfully Wendell can! I wish I could get this book into everyones home and read by all. Though you do sense the sadness of the loss of all that is of real value, you also sense the hope of what our future will be like, after the oil. We will have to return to this eventually, or we will become extinct. Well done Wendell, I will be looking for your other works.
prophetic November 20, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
So many things talked about in this book have happened. There's things he talks of that seem unbelievable...but years ago he said there would be dairy farms here and beef farms there and the diverse farms would give way to specialization. That has happened. There's a good many points in this book that presents his views - and that of many Americans - straight up. Not everyone will agree. There are companies who say it's safe to use their chemical or it's only the other guy who's careless. Country and farms are disappearing today at a rate that most don't even realize. When it's all paved over or subdivided...reread this book.
Discovering a buried treasure April 29, 2005
10 out of 15 found this review helpful
I grew up in Clarksville, TN, on the border with Guthrie, KY. Up the road not too far is Port Royal, KY, where one of the greatest living Americans still resides. He has lived there as long as I have been alive, and I am now over 30, but I had never heard of Wendell Berry until I had passed my thirtieth year. Were it not for the incomparable radio program "Unwelcome Guests", I may never have heard of him. It is a testament to the failure of our economy, education system, and culture, and it is why no thinking American doubts we are nearing a tragic and historic collapse; we are sliding fast down a snow-packed slope like a child on a greased sled. Our only short-term destiny is to smack into a tree.
"The Unsettling of America" is nearly as old as I am, and it is as alive and timely as the day it was written. Probably even more so, since its remedies are the salves for our national malady, and they need an even more urgent prescription and application today than they did 30 years ago. Berry not only succinctly and brilliantly describes how we lost our small farmers, he astutely ties that loss to the loss of culture, belonging, responsibility, community, and character we all feel and mourn in our modern lives, even if we don't understand or fully comprehend that empty feeling. It is, after all, called agri-CULTURE because the land is tied intimately with culture, and to convert agriculture into agribusiness is to divorce people from nature, from a responsibility towards nature, and from an understanding of her cycles and patterns, without which, we are incomplete; it is to convert all of us from nurturers into usurpers and exploiters, as Berry explains throughout.
So, this is not just a book about the loss of the small farmer. It is a book about our loss of liberty, independence, personal satisfaction, wealth, pride, mystery, and community. The way Berry weds these losses together throughout the book is a completely compelling. Berry's clean, beautiful, crystal clear prose moves deliberately, with a purposeful trajectory, and it effortlessly maintains a palpable weight of authority that can only be derived from real wisdom. He is a voice at once profoundly conservative and astutely liberal, or, in short, a real prophetic voice.
"The Unsettling of America" is indeed wise, and it was indeed prophetic. The dangerous excesses he foresaw 30 years ago have come to pass in ever accelerating fashion. His remedies absolutely essential for the preservation of America, and for that matter, the world. Everyone should read this book and read Wendell Berry in general. Should we carry on our culture after we smack that tree (we might, after all, break our necks), Wendell Berry will be remembered when Polk, Buchanan, Clinton, and Bush are long, long forgotten, or so we should all hope.
As Usual, Wonderful Writing of Real Truth April 12, 2005
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
Wendell Berry's writings have to be the most to-the-point, profound and real about life in rural America, how it used to be, how it might still be, but how often it is not. 'The Unsettling of America' encapsulates this all with a strong and real writing style and which tells the truth about our current way of living.
I would recommend this book to all readers, country and city dwellers alike, as it is so telling and exposing of the mess we have made of our landscape, the reasons why, and how we might actually return it to being more vibrant and real.
I would also recommend reading "Against the Machine" by Nicols Fox, recently published, which goes into more detail about the destruction of people's lives by the 'machinery' of the system in which we live, and how we might stop this also.
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