The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture | 
 enlarge | Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Sierra Club Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 17616
Media: Paperback
Edition: Revised
Pages: 246
Number Of Items: 1
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 Review
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
Berry's assessment of modern agriculture and its relationship to American culture--our health, economy, personal relationships, morals, and spiritual values--is more timely than ever. This new edition of Berry's work presents a a classic testament to the value of the American family farm.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 One of the greatest books I have ever read. October 26, 2007
M. Aguilar (Lanai City, Hawaii)
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
Janet K. Hoadley
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
Christopher W. Gibbs (Irmo, SC)
10 out of 14 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
gulfjc (Fla, Usa)
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.
Wendell tells it like it is. Truth or Consequences March 6, 2005
jeff chandler (CP, Indiana)
13 out of 16 found this review helpful
Just simply blowed away by negative reviews of this book. I grew up on a small farm when you could still make a living there. Our rural community was much closer, neighborly, trusting, and thick with the smells, sounds and sights of country living. I left home at 18 traveling the world in our military and ran from that "work ethic and way of life" on the farm. Lived in some of this worlds largest cities discovering first hand all the reasons why country living was "paradise on earth."
Oh, I've heard all the urban preachers and their reasons why they love the city. I lived it!!!!!
Is there any wonder why higher income people are moving into rural america! Land prices are thru the roof, they come here with their city mind, mouth and motivations. Why? Because they want a view and try to escape all those negative things in the city. Not to mention raise their kids in a small coummunity in hopes of everyone and everything turning out ok. They don't understand farming communities, our culture, our history nor our way of life.
Ah! We are free! But wait, they come here and destroy our pastoral settings and fill the land with strip malls, fast food joints, quick marts and infrastructure that makes it "country no more."
If any farmer holds out in this "developers dream of a jauggernaut" these new "country folk" start raising cain about the country sights, smell and sounds and want the farmer gone.
Wendell is right on in this book. Oh sure there are bits and pieces of his opinion that rub some liberal wrong. But hey I'm sure a few conservatives cried foul too.
Open up your mind and heart. Look at the facts. Can you trust corporate america? Big brother? Individual selfishness and greed? A bank director and his real estate developer friend once told me that they had joined forces with our county commissioners and planning commission community and preach their "farming is dead lets split up the land and develope the farms" gospel. If they build people will come! Hmm, sounds like a movie I once saw. They are building and people are coming.
Reality of wendell's book tells it like it is. There has been a movement (I like the word conspiracy better but that will alienate a few) to industrialize american agriculture since 1940's. The corporate machine and its disciples have forclosed on many family farms, driven off the "inefficient", destroyed many lives, all in the name of progress!!!!!!
It is all about just a select few industrial size farmers doing business as corporations, corporate chemical company profits off corporate farmers, college/universities gifted $$$millions of dollars to report and publish thru sound science (you don't believe that do you?) the wonderful benefits of more food with less land, by less farmers and healthier for you. And oh yes, our environment will be cleaner because splicing plant genes with chemical compounds and breeding new GMO (genetically modified organisms)foods means the farmer uses less chemicals (is that what the chemical company wants to do, put itself out of business for the sake of humanity? -- remember a portion of your 401k is tied to that companies performance and if they don't do well, neither will you) Roundup Ready Corn/beans/cotton/wheat is here. Spray roundup on your lawn and it does what? Dies!! Put a teaspoon of pure roundup in your coffee each morning and stir, how long before you may come up with cancer or some other ailment? No! Corporate America and our Universities have managed to fill our food pipeline with RR products for years and you consume a portion of it everytime you dine. Just a few steady PPM on a weekly basis, you'll be fine and live to a ripe old age?
Thanks Wendell for preaching the TRUTH!!!!!!
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