Product Description

This popular collection features six essays on sustainability and stewardship from one of Americas most important cultural critics. Provocative, intimate, and thoughtful, Another Turn of the Crank reaches to the heart of Wendell Berrys concern for our nation, its communities, and their future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #874085 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A collection of essays urging Americans to undertake greater involvement in their local communities.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Like Berry's previous books (What Are People For?, LJ 4/1/90), this wonderful new collection of essays concerns the order and harmony of the earth and its inhabitants. Here Berry focuses on the importance of local communities, arguing that "modern national and global economies have been formed in almost perfect disregard of community and ecological interests." Absentee owners have proven to be greedy and destructive. Similarly, a reliance on chemical technologies or the preservation of wild areas within otherwise exploited lands offers no solutions. Only local communities can provide the affection, care, and understanding essential to maintaining the wilderness. Berry offers an array of ways in which communities can become more self-sufficient and healthy, such as by supplying local needs primarily from local sources. Written with passion and conviction, this thoughtful book deserves to be widely read.?Ilse Heidmann, Kyle Community Lib., Tex.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Berry entitles his slim new book of essays with self-deflating ambivalence. Since he exhorts us again on his familiar themes--the necessity to democracy of rural communities and independent local economies; the inextricability of human from natural relationships; the importance of public property conceived and treated as common wealth; the bane that lies in confusing the organic with the mechanical, as in conceiving the body as a machine, the mind as a computer; etc.--he seems to think he risks appearing a repetitious crank, stubbornly trying to crank the engine of humane reform to life. He needn't have worried. He remains one of the most lucid writers on the most basic matters--growing food, living on earth, relating to other persons and creatures, the love enjoined by religion. He refuses to lapse into the furious jeremiad that the continuing decline of American agriculture as a way of living seems to mandate. Instead he is patient and sensible, hopeful that there is a loving wisdom to which humanity will turn and, as the Shaker hymn says, "come round right." Ray Olson