Paperback, 246 pages
English language
Published March 19, 1996 by Sierra Club Books.
In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families, and as a nation we are thus more estranged from the land - from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, as Berry notes in the afterword to this new edition, his arguments and observations are still relevant today.
We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economics dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits.
Struggled with what to rate this. By and large I think it was a 4-5 star book for me with a handful of 2 star detours. The overall thesis of the book is good though and the detours tend to be the ideas that are tangential to the overall idea. Nick Offerman narrating was a pleasant surprise that I didn't expect until I started listening, so that was cool.
A great critique of modern farming, and of modernity's capitalist-totalitarian destruction of human complexity in relation to the earth and to one another: errors of specialization, isolation, and mechanization compounded by loss of culture and values. Echoes of Buckminster Fuller, overlap with Alasdair MacIntyre; Berry writes clearly and angrily with love.
A classic Berry work, worth considering amid the social and environmental upheaval we find ourselves a part.
