The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

by Wendell Berry

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798985679816
Publisher:	Shoemaker + Company
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	528
File size:	673 KB

About the Author

Wendell Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1934, and lives and farms with his wife, Tanya Berry, close to the place of his birth. A poet, critic, storyteller, and activist, he has written more than fifty books. He is the recipient of The National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, and was named The Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is a winner of the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter I Public Knowledge, Public Language 17

Chapter II Equality, Justice, Love 29

Chapter III Degrees of Prejudice 45

1 My Old Kentucky Home 45

2 The Civil War in Kentucky 61

3 Mount Drennon During the War 66

4 A Prison Journal 74

5 The War-Made Peace in Kentucky 79

6 Remembered History 91

7 Two Races in One Place, One Time 100

8 About Several People 111

9 Something Neighborly 125

10 Degrees 128

Chapter IV Sin 133

Chapter V Forgiveness 175

1 Polarization 175

2 A Statue of My Enemy 178

3 A Third Opinion 180

4 General Morgan's Mare 190

5 Forgiveness Overruled 193

6 Lee 197

7 Times to Remember 209

8 Peacemaking 230

9 Freedom 237

Chapter VI Kinds of Prejudice 247

Chapter VII Prejudice, Victory, Freedom 267

Chapter VIII Work 291

1 Land Greed and Land Need 291

2 The Calhounian Division of Work 297

3 Work in Slavery, Work in Freedom 304

4 Nate Shaw, a Free Man 313

5 Ernest J. Gaines: The Freeing of Imagination 319

6 Crystal Wilkinson: The Tragedy of the American Home Place 338

7 Debt Slavery 341

8 Official Prejudices 349

9 Land Need and Good Work 361

10 The Fate of an Agrarian Culture 381

11 The American Dream Progresses 389

12 Culture, Work, Economy 395

13 Two Americas 403

14 A New Secession and an Invitation 417

15 On Education 423

16 Patriotism, Nationalism, Antipatriotism 429

17 Goodness 443

Chapter IX Words 447

Some Writings Related to This Book 487

Index 495

About the Author 513

Editorial Reviews

08/08/2022

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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"America’s greatest philosopher on sustainable life and living." ―Chicago Tribune

"Compelling, luminous . . . our modern-day Thoreau. He is unlike anybody else writing today. He writes at least as well as George Orwell and has an urgent message for modern industrial capitalism . . . nobody can risk ignoring him." ―Andrew Marr, New Statesman

"Whether you’re new to the words of Wendell Berry or a longtime fan of this Kentucky poet, farmer, and land-protector, you’ll want to add this tome of unforgettable, earth-moving Southern outdoors writing to the shelf." ―Garden & Gun

"Berry’s graceful essays have long been models of eloquence, insight, and conviction . . . Newcomers will find the works exceptionally timely, and the book as a whole a thoughtful introduction to Berry’s writing." ―Publishers Weekly

 

“Mr. Berry is a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau." ―The Baltimore Sun

"Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life." ―The Bloomsbury Review

From the Publisher

2022-07-30
The acclaimed farmer, novelist, and environmental essayist considers—and grumbles about—our current racial reckonings.

Berry has been writing about race for much of his career. His 1970 book, The Hidden Wound, considered the impact of slavery and its aftereffects on the country in general and his native Kentucky in particular. In essence, his approach hasn’t changed. He still advocates for tightknit communities that are, if not actively agrarian, at least compassionate toward the environment; from there, he suggests, balms to many social ills will naturally arrive. This digressive, at times exhausting book is at best a well-meaning, eloquent utopian plea to abandon urbanity; at worst, it lapses into all-lives-matter rhetoric insisting that slavery and the Confederacy, while wrongheaded, were misunderstood. Berry finds recent efforts to remove Confederate monuments to be unhelpful, leading to an extended consideration of Robert E. Lee as “one of the great tragic figures of our history, who embodied and suffered in his personal life our national tragedy.” The author also argues that most Confederate soldiers were not necessarily White supremacists but rather unfairly maligned just-following-orders types. “Whatever there may have been of kindness in slavery does not excuse it,” he writes later, “and whatever was most cruel does not typify it.” In his effort to seek nuance in racial divisions, Berry risks being misunderstood, which he acknowledges. The deeper problem is that he cherry-picks where he goes looking for nuance. He laments the Great Migration without considering its causes; curiously, mentions Jim Crow only in passing; and laments the loss of Confederate statues but doesn’t consider the option of elevating other communities in their places. The hardworking Amish farm he describes certainly sounds lovely, but his prescription that we somehow build a country from that kind of model is as impractical as any bureaucratic approach he has railed against in the past.

A rambling and frustrating book from a normally reliable author.

Kirkus Reviews