What Are People for

Rating:
Summary: A gentle voice for common sense
Review: Berry hits another homerun in this collection. This Jeffersonian throwback offers us a vision of life far removed from the shopping mall mania that is stripping much of our countryside of its natural beauty. Berry, instead, suggests that a return to basics is the best way to ensure our independence, freedom and quality of life. Berry argues, as did T.S. Eliot, that a wrong attitude toward nature suggests a wrong attitude toward God. He introduces us to men whose greatness lies in being themselves -- a black farmer named Nate Shaw, a Kentucky environmentalist named Harry Caudill, and writer Edward Abby. He explores Huck Finn and A River Runs Through It, he suggests that an education that does not prepare us to take care of ourselves cannot be complete and argues that our educational system prepares us mainly to function as cogs in an industrial society. In short, Berry sustains his claim, made in most of his books, that we need to slow down our lives, rebuild human connections, value the land around us for its intrinsic worth, and cultivate our souls by cultivating our garden, if you will. As a previous reviewer points out, Berry does not fit easily into any political movement of today -- that is because there is no Jeffersonian movement to speak of, the democrats having abandoned local empowerment, the conservatives, too many of them, having embraced corporate power. Berry's is a voice that needs to be heard.

Rating:
Summary: A good argument for a return to our roots
Review: Berry is a highly-respected environmental writer who advocates a move back to smaller communities more closely tied to the land. This is a collection of his essays. They are good, although I enjoyed his book Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community better because it was more of a cohesive unit.

Rating:
Summary: Remember the partridge
Review: Certainly Wendell Berry is a writer who helps us decipher our wings from our weights. We Americans need that as our things so weigh us down that we forget to try our wings. In quoting Blake, "No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings," he reminds us of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus the craftsman could use his craft to fashion waxen wings to help his son escape murderous pursuit but could not protect Icarus from the consequences of his own poor judgement. Daedalus himself was guilty of poor judgement when he pushed from a high tower his nephew whose invention surpassed his own. Fortunately a goddess intervened and before impact the nephew was transformed into an humble creature, the low-flying, bush-roosting partridge.
Our model here, the partridge, knows his limits. Knowledge and technology help us but do not help us infinitely. Our judgement in using technology may be flawed but it is not the fault of technology. Afterall, our bare hands were ill-used before there were axes to blame. Berry warns that our damages make us pestilent and that culture provides apology but seems to forget his own tenet that culture arises from community and our communal spirit, including our joys and our sorrows.
As humble servants and caretakers of what we are graced with, we stand in awe of earth and sky. When we yoke ourselves with the weight of the damage we have done we are being mindful. But if we confine our spirit with scruples we will never soar. And we are nothing if not flocking creatures magnificent in full formation stroking the air for all we are worth.

Rating:
Summary: If Only More People Listened
Review: I do not agree with everything Berry says in this book, but I must confess that he changed the way I see the world. His lucid dissections of American culture and economical practices, his bottom-up solutions to the problems facing us today, and his unselfish, honest prose convinced me of most of his points. Here is a writer not in it for fame or awards or prestige. Here we have a truly passionate, motivated, moral voice for these hollow times.

Rating:
Summary: Should Be Read By All
Review: This book sits on my coffee table in the living room. I draw from Mr. Berry's philosophy and writings almost daily. This book should be required reading in colleges and universities. It speaks of the sensibilities most of us have forgotten. I have loaned my copy to many friends, all have read it, it has changed the way they approach their lives and how they look at how we all live.

Rating:
Summary: Should Be Read By All
Review: This book sits on my coffee table in the living room. I draw from Mr. Berry's philosophy and writings almost daily. This book should be required reading in colleges and universities. It speaks of the sensibilities most of us have forgotten. I have loaned my copy to many friends, all have read it, it has changed the way they approach their lives and how they look at how we all live.

Rating:
Summary: Berry at his best and most contrary
Review: Wendell Berry is a farmer, poet, novelist and literary critic. It is as an essayist of enormous acuity, however, that he has become best known. What Are People For? is an important collection of essays (and two 'poem essays') written between 1975 and 1989. The pieces here range from the literary and reflective - meditations on the work of writers such as Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, to the empassioned and urgent. 'Why I am not going to buy a computer' is as cogent a rallying call for the neo-luddite movement as could be imagined! Berry is an advocate of the local, the real, the humane, that which is connected to the earth and which knows and loves its place. Essays such as 'Writer and Region', 'The Work of Local Culture' and 'Nature as Measure' display a deep-felt commitment eloquently argued. While Berry writes of the politics of farming, Hemmingway, Twain and Blake are never far away. Berry's aim is to recall his readers to the wasteland corporate, industrialised America is becoming and to offer an alternative vision, one of considerable hope. Too critical to be co-opted into the ranks of the acceptable voices, too contrary and complex to be labelled simply an 'environmentalist', Berry's writing is essential.