Overview: Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land-from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly,...

"A brassy, bighearted debut collection of twelve short stories about rurality, corpses, honeybee collapse, and illicit sex in post-coal Appalachia" --

Through most of its history, America has been a rural nation, largely made up of farmers. David B. Danbom's Born in the Country was the first-and is still the only-general history of rural America. Ranging from pre-Columbian times to the enormous changes of the twentieth century, the book masterfully integrates agricultural, technological, and economic themes with new questions about the American experience. Danbom employs the stories of particular...

"The Need to Be Whole continues the work [Berry] began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: the wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others. Without historical understanding of this practice of dispossession--the displacement of Native peoples, the destruction of both the land and land-based communities, ongoing racial...

"A collection of revelatory stories from leading journalists between the coasts, offering a perspective on immigration, drug addiction, climate change, and more that you won't find in the national media."--

"Think you know what rural America is like? Discover a plurality of perspectives in this enlightening anthology of stories that turns preconceptions on their head. Gracie sees a chance of fitting in at her South Carolina private school, until a “white trash”-themed Halloween party has her steering clear of the rich kids. Samuel's Tejano family has both stood up to oppression and been a source of it, but now he's ready to own his true sexual identity....

Oliver Douglas is a well read lawyer who has had enough of the hustle and bustle of New York, so he pulls up stakes to settle down in a more pastoral setting, much to the dismay of his glamorous wife Lisa, who's more accustomed to life in The Big Apple than on a small farm.