What Are People For?
By Wendell Berry
(North Point Press, Paperback, 9780865474376, 224pp.)
Publication Date: April 1990
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback
Categories: American - General
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In the twenty-two essays collected here, Wendell Berry, whom The Christian Science Monitor called “the prophetic American voice of our day,” conveys a deep concern for the American economic system and the gluttonous American consumer. Berry talks to the reader as one would talk to a next-door neighbor: never preachy, he comes across as someone offering sound advice. He speaks with sadness of the greedy consumption of this country’s natural resources and the grim consequences Americans must face if current economic practices do not change drastically. In the end, these essays offer rays of hope in an otherwise bleak forecast of America's future. Berry’s program presents convincing steps for America’s agricultural and cultural survival.
Wendell Berry is the author of thirty-two books of essays, poetry and novels. A native Kentuckian, he lived and taught in New York and California before returning permanently to the Kentucky River region, where he farms on 125 acres in Henry County. He has received numerous awards for his work, including one from the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters in 1971, and, most recently, the T.S. Eliot Award.
"Wherever we live, however we do so, we desperately need a prophet of responsibility; and although the days of the prophets seem past to many of us, Berry may be the closest to one we have. But, fortunately, he is also a poet of responsibility. He makes one believe that the good life may not only be harder than what we're used to but sweeter as well."--The New York Review of Books
"A London doctor on television recently defined an eccentric as one who tries to make people happy and wants the world to be a better place. By this measure Well Berry is a born eccentric who, faced with an ailing world, offers his services to help people be happy in it."--The New York Times Book Review
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