[.uk] Another Turn of the Crank (ISBN 1887178287)

Toccata and Fugue in D minor:
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor Another Turn of the Crank by Wendell Berry should *not* be the first Berry book one reads. Wendell Berry seems to attract two kinds of readers. One group of readers consists of the fanatical true-believers. They eagerly snap up every word he writes. One suspects that their objectivity has been washed away by their enthusiasm. The second group of readers are those who have just stumbled across some portion of Berry's work in the course of their meandering. They have yet to form an opinion. This review is written for the second group. Wendell Berry, as an essayist, has the ability to slice through the passivity that cocoons the modern reader. His essays challenge them to exercise their mind and to examine their value system. Berry is not an easy read, he does not mollycoddle the reader with short simple sentences. The complex sentence structure is not the result of whim or laziness. Rather, it is core to Berry's mode of writing. The image that springs to mind the exercise in logic that requires the student to sort through a box of marbles with a balance-beam scale to find the marble(s) that are different. Expect to work when you read a Wendell Berry essay. Another Turn of the Crank, specifically, is a depressing book. Berry writes in the Foreword "The proper role of government is to protect its citizens and its communities against conquest - against economic conquest just as much as conquest by overt violence." The majority of the remaining 100 pages are devoted to showing how the government failed (short synopsis: Policy supports industrial farming/forestry. Industrial farming is a commodity-extraction process. Commodity extraction does not create much wealth but is efficient for *concentrating* wealth. Wealth concentration is a zero-sum game. Weath is concentrated at the expense of others. Consequently, industrial farming causes widespread impoverishment.) and why the government failed (short synopsis: Farmers are no longer electorially significant but the cash contributions of industrial farming are.) to fill their proper role. The book projects the anguish one would expect of a general who learned that the diplomats traded away the battlefield his troops bought with blood. Another Turn of the Crank should not be the first Wendell Berry book that they read because of it's one-dimensionality. New readers of Berry will be better served to start with The Gift of Good Land, or What are People For? These collections of essays are Wendell Berry samplers. They give the reader a much better feel for the range of Wendell Berry's ability to savor the human condition and his ability to project that experience through the written word.

Caring for the world.:
Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer--a "country person" (p. 46), and a former English professor. He is also among my favorite poets. I arrived at this collection of six inspired essays through Berry's poetry. He is no ordinary country farmer, and this is no ordinary book of essays. These are not easy essays. They often raise more questions than answers. But reading them is rewarding. Poet Ezra Pound wrote, "Learn of the green world what can be thy place." For Berry, "thy place" means "good stewardship" (p. 57), which is the theme of his book. He insightfully examines farm reform, food quality, nature conservation, caring for local communities, and finding redemption in "a fallen world" (p. 102) that is controlled by "distant," "supranational" corporations. "I am a Luddite," Berry proudly proclaims, "not 'against technology' so much as I am for community" (p. 90). For Berry, "human beings, let alone human societies, cannot live indefinitely by poison and fire" (p. 47). Berry begins his book with a memorable quotation from R. S. Thomas: "What to do? Stay green/ Never mind the machine,/ Whose fuel is human souls,/ Live large, man, and dream small." He ends his book with, for me, the two most memorable essays in the collection: "The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity" and "Health is Membership." With a "turn of the crank," Berry hopes to bring his reader to a starting place to care for the world. But the point of the plucked chicken on the book's cover eludes me still. G. Merritt

A Beautiful Collection:
Once again, Berry has produced a work worth reading over and over again. By far one of his best collections of essays, I found myself warmed and heartened by his words and was impressed by how well he expresses the compatibility of good human work with nature, as they are often seen as opposing forces. He shows us how the best of our cultural traditions can bring a better life to all of us. His writings simply get better and better. If you've never read anything by Berry before, this could be a great one to start with. I also highly recommend another book of his, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. I will treasure this book for years to come.

Preaching to the Choir?:
I'd never read Berry before, but as far as I can tell, this brief collection of six essays and lectures sticks to familiar territory. However, it's probably not the best entry point for people who are newcomers to his realm. There are two related problems with the book: one of presentation, and one of tone. The problem with presentation is that the pieces are so short that there's no room for specifics. So, while one might be more or less in accord with the broad strokes of Berry's vision, there's no detail to back it all up. The problem with tone is that from the very first page the reader feels like they are being lectured at. Of course, some of the pieces are lectures, but there's a certain condescension that runs throughout the book. It comes out when Berry uses certain words such as the three As of "appropriate", "authentic" and "adequate". When these are used ( as they often are), there he's obviously made some kind of value judgment, but the reader is never let in on it. The end result of the two flaws is that the reader feels like a hectoring argument is being made without any supporting logic -- which ultimately smacks of preaching to the choir. Which is unfortunate, since I tend to agree with Berry on a lot of things (though not his anti-abortion stance). Small farms are good, agribusiness is bad, stewardship of the land is good, extraction industries are bad, treating the body as an organic whole is good, and things of that nature. Alas, he has a tendency of making sweeping assertions and accusations that are far too simplistic and shrill to be useful. Two examples from the first 15 pages will suffice to illustrate: "This is a world in which the cultures that preserve nature and rural life will simply be disallowed." and "Communists and capitalists are alike in their contempt for country people, country life, and country places." Berry also succumbs to the trick of creating straw men to counter his theses. For example, in one essay, he claims that conservationists are people who want to simply preserve land in a pristine, untouched state, and that's all. While there are certainly some conservationists who feel that way, they are a small minority of a a much larger community who actually is in almost total accord with Berry's views on stewardship and land use. It certainly doesn't help matters that his view of small-scale farming appears to be heavily tinted with rose-colored glasses. His claims that modern agribusinesses has rendered the small farm economically unviable sounds like a reasonable proposition. However, it ignores the fact that, historically, small scale farming ran on the thinnest of margins, was subject to all kind of external instability (weather, vermin, etc.), and operated on only slightly better than a subsistence level. In farming, cash is scarce, that's why people abandoned it in droves whenever the opportunity presented itself, such as in WWII, when all those defense-industry factories were opened in California. (Of course, in Berry's vision, you don't really need cash, because you barter for everything you need from your neighbors.) Berry's exhortations to create small-scale communities is worthy stuff, and even in cities people are creating this. The growth of CSAs, farmers markets, and the like in the past decade is a tangible indicator of this. However, to achieve the large scale results Berry seeks requires a more rigorous roadmap than what is provided in this slim collection.

Another valuable addition to Berry's range of essays:
This is a valuable addition to Wendell Berry's collections of essays for two primary reasons: (1) it documents a number of his pieces first delivered in speeches, whereas most of his earlier collections that centered on farming and local culture began in print, and (2) it further develops ideas as they relate to trends and events of the 1990's, a decade during which a number of his essay-driven books were guided by themes other than agricultural practice. I have noticed a number of critics who mention that this book is "not a good place to start when reading Wendell Berry," but this, as well as most of the associated comments, leave me scratching my head and wondering if these folks have actually read this book. These folks also seem not to comprehend in the least the difference between an essay and a master's thesis replete with lots of footnotes. Berry is an essayist, and to apply the words "shrill" or "vague" to his pieces is obtuse to the point of absurdity. In particular, he is quite precise in his addressing of particular cases, such as his critique of "The Kentucky Cycle" and its readings in local and national culture, and he is also distinct in his proposals for solutions and remediations concerning the issues that he addresses, whether agricultural, natural, or societal. His discussions of traditions, communities, and economic practices are solidly based on observations of how people live and interact; it is no small irony that those who critique his "rose-colored view" of the past simply subscribe to a mythologized concept of "progress" (assumed with technology) and a condescension toward "small town life." "Another Turn of the Crank" -- certainly one of Berry's funniest titles and refreshingly sharp covers -- should be read with a clear mind and its quandaries and provocative jabs at many of the assumptions of contemporary practices, whether agricultural or literary, will enliven any reader's mind.