Wendell Berry's brave new book on race, the Civil War, and his life's work.
the Berry Center in New Castle, the county seat, to help promote his ideas and teach young farmers what they need to know to give it a go. A small staff runs the center and an adjacent bookstore. Wendell writes in a small shack on stilts overlooking the Kentucky River that he built more than fifty years ago with help from others, as recounted in his essay"The Long-Legged House," part of a 1969 collection of the same name.
Berry has often mined the past with an eye toward identifying and correcting historical wrongs. In"A Native Hill," his 1968 essay about the land that he calls home, Berry writes: Berry is determined to present people on both sides of the Civil War, as neither all good nor all bad. He rejects the characterization of the Civil War, or any war, as a battle of good vs. evil.
"Disparagements of farmers, of small towns, of anything identifiable as 'provincial' can be found everywhere: in comic strips, TV shows, newspaper editorials, literary magazines, and so on," Berry. After giving some examples of this disparagement, including a 1986 article in"Am I trying to argue that all small farmers are superior or that they are all good farmers or that they live the 'idyllic life'? I certainly am not. And that is my point.
This is the same mercy that Berry seeks for the soldiers of the Confederacy. Yes, the war and the reasons for it were shameful. But so was the war in Vietnam, where the"opprobrium" attached to the U.S. soldiers who fought it was equally unjust.
In his recent letter to me, Berry noted that the flooding in eastern Kentucky had been attributed,"over and over," to global warming, rather than the state-sanctioned surface mining that made the conditions for flooding worse."Climate change is an irresistible convenience, for it can be blamed on nobody in particular, and this spares official Kentucky the burden of its complicity in the larger-scale ruin of the land of our poor state.
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