The Need to Be Whole
Patriotism and the History of Prejudice
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others.
Without historical understanding of this practice of dispossession—the displacement of Native peoples, the destruction of both the land and land-based communities, ongoing racial division—we are doomed to continue industrialism’s assault on both the natural world and every sacred American ideal. Berry writes, “To deal with so great a problem, the best idea may not be to go ahead in our present state of unhealth to more disease and more product development. It may be that our proper first resort should be to history: to see if the truth we need to pursue might be behind us where we have ceased to look.” If there is hope for us, this is it: that we honestly face our past and move into a future guided by the natural laws of affection. This book furthers Mr. Berry’s part in what is surely our country’s most vital conversation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rambling treatise, agrarian advocate Berry (The Unsettling of America) muses on race and patriotism, remembers his WWII-era Kentucky childhood, and ponders the future of a country fixated on industrialization and mobility. Contending that small family farms are healthier for fragile rural ecosystems and help foster "neighborliness" among the Black and white families who tend them, Berry is sharply critical of urban liberals and conservatives who devalue America's natural spaces and the people who live there. The book works best when Berry ponders lessons he's learned from Black authors and acquaintances including the late novelist Ernest J. Gaines (A Gathering of Old Men), with whom he shared a friendship of 61 years. Unfortunately, Berry's rose-colored remembrances of childhood friendships with Black adults don't fully reckon with the era's well-documented episodes of racial violence, and his argument that debates over the removal of Confederate monuments don't take into consideration the differences among Southern generals, "some of whom acted in good faith to heal the wound that afflicted—and still afflicts—this nation," fails to acknowledge that white supremacist organizations erected many of those monuments. The result is an occasionally eloquent but often disappointing muddle through some of America's sharpest divides.
Customer Reviews
Mr. Berry extolls the virtues of small-town agricultural living
Mr. Berry’s premise is virtuousness enough: that the citizens of small communities tend to get along because they have to and they know each other well enough to forgive one another’s peccadilloes. But he spoils the book with Lost Cause apologism. And he focuses on prejudice, when America’s problem is not prejudice—an individual preference—but racism—an institutional failing. The book becomes an old man’s extended rant about matters of which he demonstrates profound ignorance.