The need to be whole Patriotism and the history of prejudice

With this big, urgent, and gratifying book, Berry, Kentucky's great farmer, writer, activist, and National Humanities Medal recipient, brings together the strands of his nonfiction work dealing with racial prejudice and the destruction of nature and ways of living. Berry plunges deep into personal memory, the Bible, literature, and American history--saliently including the history of Kentucky, especially during the Civil War--to evoke solutions to the problems he inspects and to fully humanize the persistence of prejudice and its exacerbation by modern economic and social dogma. He emphasizes the baleful effects of industrialism (called progress)--industrial agriculture first and foremost--in disrupting connections between individuals and between people and their homes and physical places. African Americans, such as those he knew and loved as additional parents, side-by-side workers, and repositories of practical and spiritual wisdom, have been nearly erased from farming since WWII. A reader can't help wondering whether slavery was not the first step in industrializing agriculture, to be replaced by wage-slavery in the nineteenth-century South, which was cheaper. Berry's answers to prejudice and displacement are love, including loving one's enemies, rooted as much as possible in friendship; forgiveness, the theme of a chapter on Confederate monuments, Mark Twain, and the Old Order Amish; and reclaiming the land and work and how we talk about them. Invaluable counsel.

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.)