Product Description
In the twenty-four essays of this collection, Well Berry stresses the carefully modulated harmonics of indivisibility in culture and agriculture, the interdepence, the wholeness, the oneness, of man, animals, the land, the weather, and the family. To touch one, he shows, is to tamper with them all.Here he continues issues first raised in The Unsettling of America; the problems addressed there are still with us and the solutions no nearer to hand, Mr. Berry writes of his journeys to the highlands of Peru, the deserts of southern Arizona, and the Amish country to study traditional agricultural practices. He writes of homesteading, tools and their uses, horses and tractors, family work, land reclamation, diversified land use.In the title essay Mr. Berry draws parallels between the Christian notion of stewardship and the Buddhist doctrine of "right livelihood." He develops the compelling argument that the "gift" of good land has strings attached: the recipient has it only as long as he practices responsible stewardship.

Amazon.com Review
In this collection of essays, continuing the argument begun with The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes of the importance of good farming to a healthy culture. By health he means not the mere absence of disease, but the operation of a balanced, nondestructive way of life; his essays on the Amish people of Pennsylvania and Ohio offer a model. "An economy of waste," Berry writes, "is incompatible with a healthy environment"--an environment that operates in balance, within bounds. Arguing for the primacy of family-based, local economies, and for the exercise of intelligence, reverence, and community values, Berry crafts a prose idyll celebrating the pastoral existence.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 7 reviews)

Go get a time machine

this book failed to clearly convey to the reader any sense of objectivity. dont read this book.
January 29, 2007

Emphasis on "Agricultural"

Writer and farmer Wendell Berry is known for his clarity and wisdom. This collection from 1982 is not a hiccough in that summation. However, this particular book may be slightly less accessible to general readers in that the emphasis is more on the "Agri" than the "Cultural." Though in his mind there is no such silly bifurcation. The first part contains essays about his visits to farms in Peru and the American Southwest, as well as an essay about the native grasses of his home state of Kentucky. From there the topics range from the pleasures and practicalities of using actual horsepower on farms to protesting against a nuclear reactor all the way to the essay from which the book draws its name. That essay alone (a theological study of land stewardship) is worth the price of the book.
All in all, these are excellent essays, but as many of them were drawn from farming journals, may find less of an audience. However, that should not stop anyone, suburbanite nor city dweller, from reading this fine, fine collection. "To see and respect what is there is the first duty of stewardship." --from "The Native Grasses and What They Mean."
January 12, 2007

Essays that make you think

I am not a farmer, nor do not live in an agricultural landscape. However, the degredation of the rural way of life and the depredations of corporate agriculture on it have long been an interest of mine.

This series of essays goes a long way towards describing how agriculture and rural life in general could be made sustainable. Today's 'modern' agriculture is decidedly not sustainable.

The book suffers a little for the passage of time. Some of the essays that I'm sure were topical in 1979 seem a little dated as far as content is concerned. Berry's lyrical writing rescues them, however.

If you have any interest in the food you eat and how it is produced, you should read this book (then join a Community Supported Agriculture farm).
March 04, 2006

Wonderful thought provoking collection of essays

The Gift of Good Land is a wonderful thought provoking collection of essays about ancient and modern small scale agriculture and the ecological advantages of diversified small scale farming over the large scale industrial monoculture that prevails in the present day.
January 18, 2006

Diverse, easy to read and easy to like.

The Gift of Good Land is a collection of 24 essays that were originally written for magazines. The original venue means that the essays are quite readable in terms of sentence length and punctuation. These essays cover a wide range of topics.

The glue that holds these essays together is Wendell Berry's love and concern for 'good' farming. To Berry's way of thinking, good farmers mimic natural ecosystems. That is, they cultivate a diversity of crops, both plant and animal. The diversity is not random but rather it is a patchwork quilt that is lovingly matched to the idiosyncrasies of the land. The Gift of Good Land focuses on people and cultures that have somehow managed to remain good farmers in spite of economic pressures. Ironically, many of these cultures exist in brittle climates. Hostile environments kill stupid economics just as quickly as it kills stupid people.

The thing I liked best about The Gift of Good Land is that Wendell Berry genuinely LIKES the people he interviews! He treats them gently, with dignity and respect. Many authors would see Berry's people as "subjects" that are stupidly struggling to maintain the basest existence. Berry sees them as people who are heirs to thousands of years of cultural evolution, living lives that are a heroic testament to human adaptability. I prefer to see through Berry's eyes.

Attached are a few of Berry's observations that I think are particularly acute:

(In Europe)"...'marginal' farms and their farmers are looked upon as vital resources that will be needed in times of crisis, and so policies have been evolved to keep them productive."

(In the Peruvian Andes) "I wanted to see ancient American agriculture that has been carried on continuously for...4500 years... (on) steep, rocky, and otherwise 'marginal' land." "What seemed so alluring and charmed then, and seems so hard to recover now, is a live sense of contrasting scales. The scale of that landscape is immense....This way of farming that has obviously had to proceed by small considerations. It has had to consider dirt by the handful. Every seed and stem and stone has been subjected to the consideration of touch - picked up, weighed in the hand, and laid down."

(In the Sonoran Desert) "In response to their meager (arable) land, the Papago developed a culture that was one of the grand human achievements. It was intricately respectful of the means of life, surpassingly careful of all the possibilities of survival."

(In the Mid-West) "A bad solution is bad, then, because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained."

(At home) "One of the ideas most ruinous to the small farm has been that the farmer "could not afford" to produce his own food....What is your time worth? Though often asked, I do not think this question is answerable. It is the same as asking what your life is worth."

(On children) "...parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible."

(In West Virginia from the seat of a bulldozer) "...it is virtually impossible to see what you're doing..... He (the person being interviewed) still seems a little awed to think that so large a machine has to be run so much by guess." And that is a fine metaphor for life.

Consider buying this book if this kind of writing appeals to you. Otherwise, save your money.
June 15, 2000

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