The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 192 pages
• Published by: Shoemaker & Hoard May 17, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1593761198
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1593761196
• Book Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 10.4 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Called "the prophet of rural America" by the New York Times, Berry has spent the last forty of his 71 years simultaneously farming a hillside in Kentucky and issuing a stream of poems, novels and essays (including The Gift of Good Land and The Long-Legged House) that are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America's agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal. If the tone of the book's mostly brief 19 essays is sometimes angry and despairing ("We are destroying our country," begins one essay), one can hardly blame Berry. The mere title of one of the essays, "Some Notes for the Kerry Campaign, If Wanted," brings the reader up short—memories of the last presidential campaign are receding so quickly into the past that Berry's amorphous call for a return to "our traditional principles of politics and religion" is both quixotic and sad, a remnant from a vanished era. Many of the essays are taken from talks given to such organizations as the Crop Science Society of America and the Land Institute, and an air of preaching to the converted hangs over the book. The collection is not without its qualities, chief among them Berry's always well-honed prose, but if the agenda he proposes is to ever reclaim its rightful place in the body politic, it will have to be reframed in much more forceful and contemporary terms. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
Most of the longer pieces in Berry's new book about agriculture and community are speeches, though five very short essays start part 1. They are deliberately clear, straightforward, and focused on single topics; while rooted in Berry's agricultural experience and thought, they address national and international issues. A rouser against the kind of globalization that destroys small enterprises and "Charlie Fisher," which profiles a good logger to show what good logging is and can be, round out the section. With one exception, part 2 is all lectures and conference papers, altogether concerned with developing and maintaining human community, from the ground, or soil, up to the empyrean of religious affiliation, or love; the most demanding reading in the book is here. Part 3 consists of a letter on the future of the Democrats that a Montana politician solicited, the reply to it, and Courtney White's exciting report about bridge building between ranchers and conservationists. Everything in the book illumines. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (Hardcover) This book is disturbingly honest. The honesty oozes from the pages of these analytic and interpretative literary compositions. It's a bracing honesty that I am not always prepared for -- but have come to expect from this septuagenarian agrarian. In my favorite of these essays - "The Burden of the Gospels", Mr. Berry muses: But what, for example, are we to make of Luke 14:26: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." This contradicts not only the fifth commandment but Jesus' own instruction to "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It contradicts his obedience to his mother at the marriage in Cana of Galilee. It contradicts the concern he shows for the relatives of his friends and followers..." And then with stunning clarity offers the following: " We may say with some reason that such apparent difficulties might be resolved if we knew more, a further difficulty being that we don't know more. The Gospels, like all other written works, impose on their readers the burden of their incompleteness. However partial we may be to the doctrine of the true account or "realism," we must concede at last that reality is inconceivably great and any representation of it necessarily incomplete." Wendell Berry has subtitled this essay "An unconfident reader"... I suggest that this sums up the whole of this collection of essays. Berry is unconfident as he reads the American landscape of theologizing, politics, commerce, conservation, and thought. Unconfident -- but as always, uncompromisingly honest in his reading. +Aaron K.