Citizenship Papers

From Booklist
Berry says that these recent essays mostly say again what he has said before. His faithful readers may think he hasn't, however, said any of it better before. So it always seems with Berry, one of English's finest stylists, as perspicuous as T. H. Huxley at his best and as perspicacious as John Ruskin at his. Like Huxley, Berry cares about how life persists; like Ruskin, about how economics and politics impinge upon life. Naturally, then, his constant subject is the fostering of life, especially human life--in a word, agriculture. As Huxley in "On a Piece of Chalk" (1865) shows how a little natural chalk implicates vast evolutionary processes, Berry in "Let the Farm Judge" shows how one facet of agriculture--sound sheep raising--implicates all of it. Like Ruskin, Berry descries more deeply than others the dangers major crises reveal; if Ruskin's "Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century" (1884) is the most penetrating critique of industrialism in his day (the storm cloud was air pollution), Berry's pieces on 9/11 and official reaction to it constitute the most powerful response to today's global industrialism. In those essays and throughout, Berry sees America persisting, as it has for a century, to choose industrialism over agrarianism. He hopefully counsels reversing that choice and, so doing, again embracing life and community. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
There are those in America today who seem to feel we must audition for our citizenship, with "Patriot" offered as the badge for those found narrowly worthy. Let this book stand as Wendell Berry's application, for he is one of those faithful, devoted critics envisioned by the Founding Fathers to be the life's blood and very future of the nation they imagined. Adams, Jefferson, and Madison would have found great clarity in his prose and great hope in his vision. And today's readers will be moved and encouraged by his anger and his refusal to surrender in the face of desperate odds. Books get written for all sorts of reasons, and this book was written out of necessity. Citizenship Papers, a collection of 19 essays, is a ringing call of alarm to a nation standing on the brink of global catastrophe.


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Cagey uses of the essay as a town meeting to air threats to the commonweal. Our times are uneasy, Berry (Jayber Crow, 2000, etc.) states; critical elements of the American democratic tradition are being lifted wholesale from the foundation and carted away in broad daylight. A case in point is our new national-security policy, which "depends on the acquiescence of a public kept fearful and ignorant, subject to manipulation by the executive power, and on the compliance of an intimidated and office-dependent legislature." That ignorance will spell our doom, as will the "selfishness, wastefulness, and greed that we have legitimized here as economic virtues." Berry doesn't flinch when exhorting us to meet "the responsibility to be as intelligent, principled, and practical as we can be." His agrarian argument, which he has been making and remaking for decades, requires the recognition of our dependence on and responsibility to nature, and the concomitant responsibility for human culture. Likewise, Berry champions human-scale projects and an intimate knowledge of-not to mention reverence and gratitude for-our landscapes. "Consumers who understand their economy," he contends, "will not tolerate the destruction of the local soil or ecosystem or watershed as a cost of production." His refusal to abandon the local for the global, to sacrifice neighborliness, community integrity, and economic diversity for access to Wal-Mart, has never seemed more appealing, nor his questions of personal accountability more powerful. Where did the meat on our plates come from? Under what conditions were the clothes we're wearing made? Does biotechnology make sense considering the unforeseeable consequences? Mostblistering of all: "How many deaths of other people's children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) 'at peace'?" A clangor of worries, offering the antidotes of civility, responsibility, curiosity, skill, kindness, and an awareness of the homeplace.


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