The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural [Paperback]

Wendell Berry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1981

In the twenty-four essays of this collection, Well Berry stresses the carefully modulated harmonics of indivisibility in culture and agriculture, the interdepence, the wholeness, the oneness, of man, animals, the land, the weather, and the family. To touch one, he shows, is to tamper with them all.Here he continues issues first raised in The Unsettling of America; the problems addressed there are still with us and the solutions no nearer to hand, Mr. Berry writes of his journeys to the highlands of Peru, the deserts of southern Arizona, and the Amish country to study traditional agricultural practices. He writes of homesteading, tools and their uses, horses and tractors, family work, land reclamation, diversified land use.In the title essay Mr. Berry draws parallels between the Christian notion of stewardship and the Buddhist doctrine of "right livelihood." He develops the compelling argument that the "gift" of good land has strings attached: the recipient has it only as long as he practices responsible stewardship.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this collection of essays, continuing the argument begun with The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes of the importance of good farming to a healthy culture. By health he means not the mere absence of disease, but the operation of a balanced, nondestructive way of life; his essays on the Amish people of Pennsylvania and Ohio offer a model. "An economy of waste," Berry writes, "is incompatible with a healthy environment"--an environment that operates in balance, within bounds. Arguing for the primacy of family-based, local economies, and for the exercise of intelligence, reverence, and community values, Berry crafts a prose idyll celebrating the pastoral existence.

Review

"These books [Recollected Essays and The Gift of Good Land] are the kind that you sp months with, hate to give up, and plan to return to soon and often. There is much pure pleasure in them, both in the spare and crafted eloquence of their prose, and in the breadth and depth of their content. They're reference works of the body and soul..." --The Washington Post Book World

"These pieces are angry, urgent, courageous, joyous and reaffirming." --Philadelphia Inquirer

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Product Details

• Paperback: 281 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press; 1st edition (1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865470529
• ISBN-13: 978-0865470521
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,213,817 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Diverse, easy to read and easy to like., June 15, 2000

By 

Joseph J Hecksel - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural (Paperback)

The Gift of Good Land is a collection of 24 essays that were originally written for magazines. The original venue means that the essays are quite readable in terms of sentence length and punctuation. These essays cover a wide range of topics.

The glue that holds these essays together is Wendell Berry's love and concern for 'good' farming. To Berry's way of thinking, good farmers mimic natural ecosystems. That is, they cultivate a diversity of crops, both plant and animal. The diversity is not random but rather it is a patchwork quilt that is lovingly matched to the idiosyncrasies of the land. The Gift of Good Land focuses on people and cultures that have somehow managed to remain good farmers in spite of economic pressures. Ironically, many of these cultures exist in brittle climates. Hostile environments kill stupid economics just as quickly as it kills stupid people.

The thing I liked best about The Gift of Good Land is that Wendell Berry genuinely LIKES the people he interviews! He treats them gently, with dignity and respect. Many authors would see Berry's people as "subjects" that are stupidly struggling to maintain the basest existence. Berry sees them as people who are heirs to thousands of years of cultural evolution, living lives that are a heroic testament to human adaptability. I prefer to see through Berry's eyes.

Attached are a few of Berry's observations that I think are particularly acute:

(In Europe)"...'marginal' farms and their farmers are looked upon as vital resources that will be needed in times of crisis, and so policies have been evolved to keep them productive."

(In the Peruvian Andes) "I wanted to see ancient American agriculture that has been carried on continuously for...4500 years... (on) steep, rocky, and otherwise 'marginal' land." "What seemed so alluring and charmed then, and seems so hard to recover now, is a live sense of contrasting scales. The scale of that landscape is immense....This way of farming that has obviously had to proceed by small considerations. It has had to consider dirt by the handful. Every seed and stem and stone has been subjected to the consideration of touch - picked up, weighed in the hand, and laid down."

(In the Sonoran Desert) "In response to their meager (arable) land, the Papago developed a culture that was one of the grand human achievements. It was intricately respectful of the means of life, surpassingly careful of all the possibilities of survival."

(In the Mid-West) "A bad solution is bad, then, because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained."

(At home) "One of the ideas most ruinous to the small farm has been that the farmer "could not afford" to produce his own food....What is your time worth? Though often asked, I do not think this question is answerable. It is the same as asking what your life is worth."

(On children) "...parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible."

(In West Virginia from the seat of a bulldozer) "...it is virtually impossible to see what you're doing..... He (the person being interviewed) still seems a little awed to think that so large a machine has to be run so much by guess." And that is a fine metaphor for life.

Consider buying this book if this kind of writing appeals to you. Otherwise, save your money.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essays from a social and cultural prophet, December 5, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Rose Hill , Iowa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural (Paperback)

Rural America's problems are often dwarfed by urban conflicts. Popular media attention is directed toward the larger market, but rural problems are ominously similar, declining incomes, shrinking population bases, abandoned school districts, empty store-fronts, and shattered communities. Berry is the preeminent rural philosopher to carry this message to a larger audience. Using the language of landscape, community, economics, and a good dose of spirituality the author demonstrates that the problems of rural America are the problems of a society that pursues ways to make a living rather than a society that pursues ways to live. Most of these essays are approching twenty years old and the causes and consequences of national and social inattention are just as relevent today as in the late 70's. If you have been looking for sound,sane , perceptive insights on how to live well in the place you are then I highly recommend this book. If you want to think about the future of the nation's food supply, soil resources, water quality, and the social sustainability of modern economics on agriculture then this is a book you will read and return to again and again.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yes, Berry is like a prophet., July 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural (Paperback)

This book has powerful insights about our society today. When I read it, I can't help but acknowledge all of Berry's arguments; he is so convincing. I can't do a very good job in summing up his thesis, but basically our "slash-and-burn" petroleum-based industrial economy is killing us--killing us physically, spiritually, and culturally. He advocates a return to small subsistence farming and learning how to better take care of the Earth and of each other. Right now, our hyper-consuming way of life is destroying our children's world.