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Toccata and Fugue in D minor Toccata and Fugue in D Minor Another Turn of the Crank by Wendell Berry should *not* be the first Berry book one reads. Wendell Berry seems to attract two kinds of readers. One group of readers consists of the fanatical true-believers. They eagerly snap up every word he writes. One suspects that their objectivity has been washed away by their enthusiasm. The second group of readers are those who have just stumbled across some portion of Berry's work in the course of their meandering. They have yet to form an opinion. This review is written for the second group. Wendell Berry, as an essayist, has the ability to slice through the passivity that cocoons the modern reader. His essays challenge them to exercise their mind and to examine their value system. Berry is not an easy read, he does not mollycoddle the reader with short simple sentences. The complex sentence structure is not the result of whim or laziness. Rather, it is core to Berry's mode of writing. The image that springs to mind the exercise in logic that requires the student to sort through a box of marbles with a balance-beam scale to find the marble(s) that are different. Expect to work when you read a Wendell Berry essay. Another Turn of the Crank, specifically, is a depressing book. Berry writes in the Foreword "The proper role of government is to protect its citizens and its communities against conquest - against economic conquest just as much as conquest by overt violence." The majority of the remaining 100 pages are devoted to showing how the government failed (short synopsis: Policy supports industrial farming/forestry. Industrial farming is a commodity-extraction process. Commodity extraction does not create much wealth but is efficient for *concentrating* wealth. Wealth concentration is a zero-sum game. Weath is concentrated at the expense of others. Consequently, industrial farming causes widespread impoverishment.) and why the government failed (short synopsis: Farmers are no longer electorially significant but the cash contributions of industrial farming are.) to fill their proper role. The book projects the anguish one would expect of a general who learned that the diplomats traded away the battlefield his troops bought with blood. Another Turn of the Crank should not be the first Wendell Berry book that they read because of it's one-dimensionality. New readers of Berry will be better served to start with The Gift of Good Land, or What are People For? These collections of essays are Wendell Berry samplers. They give the reader a much better feel for the range of Wendell Berry's ability to savor the human condition and his ability to project that experience through the written word. Caring for the world. Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer--a "country person" (p. 46), and a former English professor. He is also among my favorite poets. I arrived at this collection of six inspired essays through Berry's poetry. He is no ordinary country farmer, and this is no ordinary book of essays. These are not easy essays. They often raise more questions than answers. But reading them is rewarding. Poet Ezra Pound wrote, "Learn of the green world what can be thy place." For Berry, "thy place" means "good stewardship" (p. 57), which is the theme of his book. He insightfully examines farm reform, food quality, nature conservation, caring for local communities, and finding redemption in "a fallen world" (p. 102) that is controlled by "distant," "supranational" corporations. "I am a Luddite," Berry proudly proclaims, "not 'against technology' so much as I am for community" (p. 90). For Berry, "human beings, let alone human societies, cannot live indefinitely by poison and fire" (p. 47). Berry begins his book with a memorable quotation from R. S. Thomas: "What to do? Stay green/ Never mind the machine,/ Whose fuel is human souls,/ Live large, man, and dream small." He ends his book with, for me, the two most memorable essays in the collection: "The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity" and "Health is Membership." With a "turn of the crank," Berry hopes to bring his reader to a starting place to care for the world. But the point of the plucked chicken on the book's cover eludes me still. G. Merritt As lucid as it gets. Wendell Berry patiently keeps showing us how to regain the sanity and goodness that life once held. Here are six essays: Farming and the Global Economy; Conserving Community; Conserving Forest Communities; Private Property and the Common Wealth; The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity; Health is Membership. In Conserving Community, Berry lists 17 specific guidelines for regaining our lives by rebuilding our communities. They alone are worth far more than the price of the book--if we use them. Berry keeps turning the crank; we need to start the engine. A must read! As a long-time fan of Wendell Berry, I was expecting a something thought provoking. I underestimated him. In this collection of essays Berry has gone beyond his usual high standard to write something utterly transcendent. I place it squarly in the same league as Abbey's "Desert Solitaire" and Walker's "Winter Wheat" for beauty of prose, story-telling and quality of instruction. The essays are thoughtful, spiritual and finally, telling - about where we are, and where we could be. After enjoying Berry for years, this one caused me to send him a thank you note for writing it. This one is a keeper A Beautiful Collection Once again, Berry has produced a work worth reading over and over again. By far one of his best collections of essays, I found myself warmed and heartened by his words and was impressed by how well he expresses the compatibility of good human work with nature, as they are often seen as opposing forces. He shows us how the best of our cultural traditions can bring a better life to all of us. His writings simply get better and better. If you've never read anything by Berry before, this could be a great one to start with. I also highly recommend another book of his, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. I will treasure this book for years to come. See also:
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