List Price: $15.95
Save: $5.66 (35%)

FREE Shipping on orders over $25—or get FREE Two-Day Shipping with Amazon Prime

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Ship to:

Select a shipping address:

Other Sellers on Amazon

Add to Cart

$6.00
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: Books Overstocks

Add to Cart

$15.48
+ Free Shipping

Sold by: Book Depository US

Add to Cart

$11.60
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: booksXpress

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural Paperback – May 1, 2009

by Wendell Berry (Author)

12 customer reviews

See all 7 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

$327.54

$22.50

Paperback

"Please retry"

$10.29

$6.00

$7.97

The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still with us and the solutions no nearer to hand. One of the insistent themes of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, the land, weather, animals, and family. To touch one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture.

The twenty-four essays in this collection cover a variety of subjects; the author’s journeys to the Peruvian Andes, to the desert of southern Arizona, and to Amish country to study the evolution of ancient native agricultural practices. In “Solving for Pattern,” Mr. Berry lists fourteen critical standards for solving agricultural problems that can just as easily be used as standards for solving personal and family problems. In the title essay, the author examines our Judeo-Christian heritage to discover parallels with the Buddhist doctrine of “right livelihood” or “right occupation.” He develops the compelling argument that the “gift” of good land has strings attached. We have it only on loan and only for as long as we practice good stewardship.

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

$10.29
FREE Shipping on orders over $25—or get FREE Two-Day Shipping with Amazon Prime In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Frequently bought together

Total price: $34.06

Buy the selected items together

This item:The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural by Wendell Berry Paperback $10.29
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture by Wendell Berry Paperback $11.99
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry by Wendell Berry Paperback $11.78
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Wendell Berry

24

Paperback
$11.99
Wendell Berry

41

Paperback
$11.78
Wendell Berry

41

Paperback
$9.34
Wendell Berry

46

Paperback
$12.83
Daniel L. Brunner

16

Paperback
$14.90
Norman Wirzba

7

Paperback
$13.71

Special offers and product promotions

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Counterpoint (May 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1582434840
ISBN-13: 978-1582434841
Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.9 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 12 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #423,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #589 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Nature Writing & Essays
- #1143 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Ecology
- #1870 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars

5 star		75%
4 star		17%
3 star		8%
2 star		0%
1 star		0%

Write a customer review

See all verified purchase reviews

Top customer reviews

Emphasis on "Agricultural"

ByScot F. Martinon January 11, 2007

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Writer and farmer Wendell Berry is known for his clarity and wisdom. This collection from 1982 is not a hiccough in that summation. However, this particular book may be slightly less accessible to general readers in that the emphasis is more on the "Agri" than the "Cultural." Though in his mind there is no such silly bifurcation. The first part contains essays about his visits to farms in Peru and the American Southwest, as well as an essay about the native grasses of his home state of Kentucky. From there the topics range from the pleasures and practicalities of using actual horsepower on farms to protesting against a nuclear reactor all the way to the essay from which the book draws its name. That essay alone (a theological study of land stewardship) is worth the price of the book.

All in all, these are excellent essays, but as many of them were drawn from farming journals, may find less of an audience. However, that should not stop anyone, suburbanite nor city dweller, from reading this fine, fine collection. "To see and respect what is there is the first duty of stewardship." --from "The Native Grasses and What They Mean."

0Comment 6 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

The way things ought to be.

ByMOgrannyon March 19, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Entertaining and thought provoking essays on sustainable agriculture and living close to the land. The life that was so common in our country until after WWII. Very worthwhile read.

0Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

A voice of reason

ByHitchcock Slyon October 20, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I just became acquainted with Wendell Berry's work recently and have only read a couple of his books. His is a sane voice in an insane world. He is a man I would love to meet and talk with.

0Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

One of my favorites

ByDakotah Cunninghamon February 11, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I love Wendell Berry. This is a book I have on my shelf and have purchased several as gifts for others.

0Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Five Stars

ByRuth McGrathon October 25, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Inspiring

0CommentWas this review helpful to you?YesNo

Farming prophecy.

Bywindhoveron July 14, 2015

Format: Paperback

Published over 30 years ago, I have just read these collected essays for the first time and they are a revelation. I read a book of Wendell Berry’s poetry back in the ‘70’s or 80’s and was impressed by his tone of reverence for the mysteries of soil and the life which springs from it. But I had long since decided that a landed life was not for me so I moved on to other writers. When people spoke of “love of the land” or “sense of place” I didn’t know what they were talking about and I didn’t know enough to care. Other than the ground my house sits on, my own patch of land measures roughly the size of 2 banquet tables. I have enjoyed my landless life and have no intention of giving it up now. But—I’d be a dim bulb indeed not to see, in the stewards of soil presented here, that I have been missing something.

The Gift of Good Land was written in tribute to the small-scale farmer because “small-scale agriculture is virtually synonymous with good agriculture”. Mr. Berry gives evidence of this principle by introducing us to about a dozen small farmers whose varied practices are intimately tied to the specific nature of their given piece of earth. The Peruvian who cultivates steep and rocky terrain on a mountainside high in the Andes uses a type of “hoe farming” that has sustained his family and their Inca forbears across centuries. The Amish continue to farm small holdings because their horse-drawn implements limit the acreage they are able to plant and harvest. And yet their farms remain abundant and profitable generation after generation.

In their small agriculture, these men and women come to know the unique habits of their land in ways that industrial farmers with their massive “acre eaters” never can. In any particular region, Berry tells us, there is a limit beyond which a farm outgrows the attention and affection of a single owner. Keenly aware of the living interplay between their own topography and the many acts of nature which condition it, the small farmers’ sense of place becomes ingrained. Because they know their land and love it, they learn to sense its needs and harvest potential acre by acre or even yard by yard. It responds to their mindful cultivation with a bounty that does not deplete the earth.

And for all that, there is virtually no public appreciation for the disciplines necessary to good farming. The good farmer, along with the bad, is “typically regarded as a drudge without learning, a hick without dignity.”

I didn’t buy this book from Amazon—I picked it up at a library bin sale. I’m taking time to write this review because I want other readers to know that, over 30 years later, the wisdom in these pages has not lost relevance and has, perhaps, gained in urgency. It would be hard to come up with a better companion piece to the Pope’s latest encyclical (the one about climate change). Wendell Berry is no Bible thumper. But that did not stop him from making his own case for the proper Christian approach to agriculture and the conservation of resources.

In the final chapter he advocates for an ethic that esteems perseverance in un-heroic tasks equally with the grand action. He wonders whether the work of real stewardship, like real prayer and real charity, must be done in secret. These are his concluding words: “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of the Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”

I think I need to read more Wendell Berry.

0CommentWas this review helpful to you?YesNo

From a non-farmer....GREAT read!

Byintrepid2on May 10, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Very interesting to the layperson (city type). Much to think about that was never considered. I have passed this around to several with similar comments. All found this very informative. There may not be anything "spectacular or noteworthy" to a farm type person, but was a real eye-opener to us. Highly recommended for those who know nothing about farming, just for general thoughts about what is done and should be done on a farm.

0Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Most recent customer reviews

Essays that make you think

I am not a farmer, nor do not live in an agricultural landscape. However, the degredation of the rural way of life and the depredations of corporate agriculture on it have long...Read more

Published on March 3, 2006 by Brian D. Herner

Wonderful thought provoking collection of essays

The Gift of Good Land is a wonderful thought provoking collection of essays about ancient and modern small scale agriculture and the ecological advantages of diversified small...Read more

Published on January 17, 2006 by Robert 93940

Diverse, easy to read and easy to like.

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...Read more

Published on June 15, 2000 by Joseph J Hecksel

Yes, Berry is like a prophet.

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.Read more

Published on July 3, 1999

Essays from a social and cultural prophet

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...Read more

Published on December 5, 1997 by mlaug

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

Set up a giveaway