Citizenship Papers: Essays - Hardcover

Berry, Wendell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593760000 ISBN 13: 9781593760007

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2003

Synopsis

"The courage of a book, it has been said, is that it looks away from nothing. Here is a brave book." ―The Charlotte Observer

"Berry says that these recent essays mostly say again what he has said before. His faithful readers may think he hasn't, however, said any of it better before." ―Booklist (starred review)

"His refusal to abandon the local for the global, to sacrifice neighborliness, community integrity, and economic diversity for access to Wal-Mart, has never seemed more appealing, nor his questions of personal accountability more powerful." ―Kirkus Reviews

There are those in America today who seem to feel we must audition for our citizenship, with "patriot" offered as the badge for those found narrowly worthy. Let this book stand as Wendell Berry's application, for he is one of those faithful, devoted critics envisioned by the Founding Fathers to be the life's blood and very future of the nation they imagined. Citizenship Papers collects nineteen new essays, from celebrations of exemplary lives to critiques of American life, including "A Citizen's Response [to the new National Security Strategy]"―a ringing call of caution to a nation standing on the brink of global catastrophe.

About this title

About the Author

Wendell Berry is a former professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

From Booklist

Berry says that these recent essays mostly say again what he has said before. His faithful readers may think he hasn't, however, said any of it better before. So it always seems with Berry, one of English's finest stylists, as perspicuous as T. H. Huxley at his best and as perspicacious as John Ruskin at his. Like Huxley, Berry cares about how life persists; like Ruskin, about how economics and politics impinge upon life. Naturally, then, his constant subject is the fostering of life, especially human life--in a word, agriculture. As Huxley in "On a Piece of Chalk" (1865) shows how a little natural chalk implicates vast evolutionary processes, Berry in "Let the Farm Judge" shows how one facet of agriculture--sound sheep raising--implicates all of it. Like Ruskin, Berry descries more deeply than others the dangers major crises reveal; if Ruskin's "Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century" (1884) is the most penetrating critique of industrialism in his day (the storm cloud was air pollution), Berry's pieces on 9/11 and official reaction to it constitute the most powerful response to today's global industrialism. In those essays and throughout, Berry sees America persisting, as it has for a century, to choose industrialism over agrarianism. He hopefully counsels reversing that choice and, so doing, again embracing life and community. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1593760000
• ISBN 13: 9781593760007
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192