Review of new Wendell Berry collection

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry is a selection of 31 essays spanning five decades of his works, and it could not have come at a better time as our nation thrashes about in search of a voice of reason. Who better than Berry to explain to us “who we are, where we are, and what we must do to live” (“The Way of Ignorance,” 2004)? The essays are not presented in chronological order, nor even in any kind of thematic progression; rather, the collection, arranged by Paul Kingsnorth of County Galway, Ireland, rhapsodizes in a kind of orchestral composition of rhetorical movements – from ethos to pathos to logos and back again.

Berry is not confined to the subjects related to his bailiwick i.e., agrarian culture, and is utterly unafraid of any topic that sticks in his craw, as only a humble “apprentice of creation” and a writer without institutional affiliations can be. He lays into quite an assortment of subjects from economics to feminism to education to civil disobedience, and a whole host of topics in between, each one a treasure of insight and strategic action.

Read "'The World-Ending Fire' collects 31 essential Wendell Berry essays" by Richard Horan at The Christian Science Monitor.