The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

by Wendell Berry

Overview

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 true and the solutions no nearer to hand. The insistent theme of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, 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. Here, Berry 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582434841
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	05/01/2009
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among other distinctions. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.

Editorial Reviews

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

Philadelphia Inquirer

"These books [Recollected Essays and The Gift of Good Land] are the kind that you spend 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..."

Washington Post Book World