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Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, by George Orwell
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Amazon.com Review
Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It's OK to Write a Book Report About. (The latter is three pages longer and less fun to read.) Fueled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime, productivity soars, and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full. The animals' Seven Commandment credo is painted in big white letters on the barn. All animals are equal. No animal shall drink alcohol, wear clothes, sleep in a bed, or kill a fellow four-footed creature. Those that go upon four legs or wings are friends and the two-legged are, by definition, the enemy. Too soon, however, the pigs, who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. "We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples." While this swinish brotherhood sells out the revolution, cynically editing the Seven Commandments to excuse their violence and greed, the common animals are once again left hungry and exhausted, no better off than in the days when humans ran the farm. Satire Animal Farm may be, but it's a stony reader who remains unmoved when the stalwart workhorse, Boxer, having given his all to his comrades, is sold to the glue factory to buy booze for the pigs. Orwell's view of Communism is bleak indeed, but given the history of the Russian people since 1917, his pessimism has an air of prophecy. --Joyce Thompson
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Review
“Animal Farm remains our great satire on the darker face of modern history.” –Malcolm Bradbury“As lucid as glass and quite as sharp…[Animal Farm] has the double meaning, the sharp edge, and the lucidity of Swift.” –Atlantic Monthly“A wise, compassionate, and illuminating fable for our times.” –New York Times“Orwell has worked out his theme with a simplicity, a wit, and a dryness that are close to La Fontaine and Gay, and has written in a prose so plain and spare, so admirably proportioned to his purpose, that Animal Farm even seems very creditable if we compare it with Voltaire and Swift.” –Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker“Orwell’s satire here is amply broad, cleverly conceived, and delightfully written.” –San Francisco Chronicle“The book for everyone and Everyman, its brightness undimmed after fifty years.” –Ruth RendellWith an Introduction by Julian Symons
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Product details
Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: Berkley; Anniversary edition (June 1, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0452277507
ISBN-13: 978-0452277502
Product Dimensions:
5.4 x 0.3 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
4,190 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#64,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Great book, but my copy is almost unreadable. Anywhere in the book where the letters "iv" are together, i.e. live, given, etc. the word is broken up with "Chapter IV" in the middle. As in gChapter IVen. Or how about prChapter IVately. Very disappointed that this would be put out. Add paragraph breaks mid-sentence and you now have a literary nightmare.Just noticed this date on the last page. This the date I ordered it. No publisher. Almost seems bootleg-ish....I want my money back.
My review is not of the book Animal Farm but of this edition. In case you are looking for a review of the book itself, I highly recommend it. It is a wonderful book and strangely relevant today.I bought this paperback edition from Amazon a few days ago. When it arrived, it looked like someone had printed it on a desktop printer and stapled it together. That on its own wouldn't be a major issue.The deal killer and the reason for the one star review is that someone appears to have run a find and replace on the letter pair "IV" replacing it with the words "Chapter IV". So, for instance, the word "perspective" reads "perspectChapter IVe" and the word "receive" reads "receChapter IVe". The entire book has been affected by this. Glancing through the book, I realized how often the letter pair IV appears in English. Nearly every page in the book has at least one word affected by this.When I first received a copy, I assumed it was that specific copy and ordered another one with a different cover. I didn't check the manufacturer. Turns out it is the same book with a different cover and the issue was in it again.If you are looking to buy an edition of the book, buy some other manufacturer's copy unless you'd like to decipher words with random "Chapter IV" in the middle just for fun.
I am reviewing Amazon's "paperback" edition - not the novel itself (which is wonderful.) This edition was literally printed to fill my order - the date printed on the final page is 3 days before I received it in the mail. The type is tiny, there are weird blank lines throughout, and the words "Chapter IV" just appear randomly many, many times. It's unreadable. What on earth is Amazon playing at by selling this garbage product?I now know that reviews of a "book" on Amazon are not necessarily reviews of the product you are buying. I assumed this edition would be fine since it had over 4 stars. But I now see the average stars include all kinds of editions including Kindle.
The book itself is great - no issues with the book. This kindle version, however, is a travesty. There is not a single paragraph without a glaring typo. It's as if they just scanned the pages of a print version, let the OCR run wild, and did zero proofreading afterwards. Examples include "expect" instead of "except," "to" instead of "too," missing words, punctuation in the wrong place, etc.It's so distracting, that I had stop reading at the beginning of chapter 7, and get a different version. Do yourself a favor and skip this version.
In the 21st century, when we believe that everything is evolving around us and that all countries are moving forward, we realize that there is still a parasite which it is difficult to get rid of.Countries that had the opportunity to evolve, have had to pass a difficult test of not falling into totalitarianism and ambition. Such was the case of some countries of the Soviet Union that achieved liberation, but still others continue to fall into the same abyss from which they can't rise, or don't want to, since that parasite has crawled in the mind of their crowd, as did happen in North Korea, China, etc.Animal Farm shows the perfect example of how the unhealthy idea of ​​a cheap Socialism began to take root to become a dictatorial Communism, as it happens in Venezuela today. Its strange end leaves a bitter taste that perhaps the writer did on purpose to open the consciousness of future generations. An open ending that forces the reader to ask himself: what is the solution? And how will it end?Through human experiences of the animals of this farm, we can identify this truth that still lingers in some shady societies of the present. The solution is in our hands. It will depend on the degree of preparation, culture, moral values, determination, and courage people have to free their homeland and achieve a better future. Remember governments must fear the people and not the opposite.After that, I summarize my point of view about the strongest references dealt with through the characters in this book (that can be easily identify and distinguished when you start to read the story) in the following sections:1) Leaders full of charisma who manage to enter the hearts of the crowd by their power of conviction. They choose the most insecure sectors and people to whom they inject large doses of false trust and dependence, and then use them in the propagation of their miserable revolution.2) From the beginning, they call a supposed self-identification and self-recognition through rhythmic and flattering slogans. They remember again and again their few and poor achievements that remain in the distant past. Then, they impose a barrier of differences between them and the supposed enemy. In this way, the people is infused with a nationalism that is based on ignorance, fear, and blind reverence, forcing them to repeat proverbs and apply reforms without understanding the true meaning or purpose, thus beginning to resemble a herd of sheep, marching pleased towards the slaughterhouse.3) They make the crowd believe that they have the final decision and, for the common good, unconsciously follow the rules and imposed parameters. In addition, some extra benefits are allowed to those who follow and protect the regime indulgently. This is how they teach the majority that it is better to be corrupt, dishonest, and negligent, in order to achieve higher ranks.4) The regime feel entitled to legalize and abolish what suits it, ordering the people what to eat, how to dress, greet and live, and what to learn, while they live freely at the expense of the efforts of others and of the injustices committed, trampling the honor of an entire country and their own Machiavellian socialist laws.5) What seemed a worthy plan for community, social, intellectual, and economic development, now shows the true intention that tries to kill the spirit of solidarity to impose the dictatorial and even genocidal plan, if the regressive revolution warrants it.6) Everyone, even the majority of the crowd, realize that revolutionary projects are a total failure when they find themselves amidst of aberrant poverty.7) When they want to discredit an opponent or other progressive ideas, they use their famous method of defamation with lies, intimidation, and any other means. For them, the aim (maintain / save the revolution) justifies the means (spreading false rumors, prosecutions, torture, hunger, espionage), importing in the least the opinion of others, since their own people live in ignorance, cowardice and/or conformism.8) To finally protect their interests and ideals, communists surround themselves with and associate with allies of their own class: corrupt, traffickers, murderers and terrorists, and expand their power further through the destruction of every vital block of a society , from its financial structure to public sectors, such as health, without caring about the misery that people live. To rule the ignorant and negligent is much easier.9) There comes a time when the revolutionary-communist doctrine is so deeply rooted in the consciences, that the people forget how well they lived before. The most outrageous thing is that there are still people who support such regimes and whose can mental programming is so easily influenced on behalf the sadistic needs and convenience of these cunning and malevolent rulers.Times before the Rebellion are being left in the past, where the memories struggle to keep them safe to share them with others
Do not order the paperback version pictured here. The font is so small it is unreadable, but that is the least of the troubles of this book. There is no copyright information or title page, there are paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences and every single time the letters "iv" appear in a word it is replaced with "Chapter IV". I have added a few photos so you can avoid the same issue I had.
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Download PDF Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter, by Adeline Yen Mah
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Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter, by Adeline Yen Mah
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Review
"I read for two nights, sleepless, my heart pierced by Adeline Yen Mah's account of her terrible childhood. Falling Leaves is a potent psychological drama pitting a stubborn little girl against the most merciless of adversaries and rivals: her own family. I am still haunted by Mah's memoir." —Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club"Painful and lovely, at once heartbreaking and heartening."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post"Brilliant, compelling, and unforgettable. A heartrending modern-day Cinderella story set against the turbulence of twentieth-century China. Autobiography at its best."—Nien Chang, author of Life and Death in Shanghai
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From the Inside Flap
Born in 1937 in a port city a thousand miles north of Shanghai, Adeline Yen Mah was the youngest child of an affluent Chinese family who enjoyed rare privileges during a time of political and cultural upheaval. But wealth and position could not shield Adeline from a childhood of appalling emotional abuse at the hands of a cruel and manipulative Eurasian stepmother. Determined to survive through her enduring faith in family unity, Adeline struggled for independence as she moved from Hong Kong to England and eventually to the United States to become a physician and writer. A compelling, painful, and ultimately triumphant story of a girl's journey into adulthood, Adeline's story is a testament to the most basic of human needs: acceptance, love, and understanding. With a powerful voice that speaks of the harsh realities of growing up female in a family and society that kept girls in emotional chains, Falling Leaves is a work of heartfelt intimacy and a rare authentic portrait of twentieth-century China.
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Product details
Paperback: 278 pages
Publisher: Broadway Books (April 6, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780767903578
ISBN-13: 978-0767903578
ASIN: 0767903579
Product Dimensions:
5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
418 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#36,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I was captivated by Adeline's life story and found it extremely painful to read about her childhood hardships. The unfairness of it all. It wasn't until I talked with a friend from another culture that I came to better understand that the child born to a mother who dies in childbirth is considered evil and consequently, certainly unwanted. Cruel to be sure, but the added cruelty was from a selfish, uncaring stepmother. Thank goodness for the kindness of her Auntie, who left Adeline with the courage, fortitude and wherewithal to make it through her difficult childhood. I kept thinking, "Adeline will grow up." That is what kept me reading on -- knowing that someday she would be an adult and free of the tyranny of her childhood. The compelling thing though, is that none of us, certainly not Adeline, is free from the forever hope of acceptance and approval. Even though one wonders why it is in the human nature to try so hard to gain that approval from someone so evil and mean spirited as her stepmother. It was gratifying to learn that the approval she so desperately needed was found in the end when reading her father's will.This is a compelling read, though difficult. How good to know that Adeline found a kindred spirit in her husband, Bob. What kind of mother was she? That question isn't answered in this book. I think the wounds go deep and certainly must have affected her ability to love and nurture her boys.This book touches every nerve in the human spirit. I highly recommend it.
Mainly set in 1940-50’s China, Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter is a personal account a women’s lifelong hardships stemming from an unloving family and traditional Chinese thinking. It’s an emotional read that provokes empathy over the sadness of Mah’s story but also inspires confidence because of her determination to succeed in life.Despite growing up in a very powerful and wealthy family due to her Father’s export business, Mah didn’t have as enjoyable of a childhood as one would think. Right from birth, She was looked at negatively in the household as her mother died giving birth to her. Mah explains her position in the family blatantly when saying, “I knew that I was the least-loved child because I was a girl and because my mother had died giving birth to me.†Her family's perception of her characterizes the beliefs of 20th century China well: women were subordinate to men because they could not be able to provide for a family financially due to limited social mobility, and killing your mother in childbirth meant you were bad luck. These conditions already gave her bad relations with most of her family. Her father ignored her because her existence embodied the loss of his significant other, and her siblings tormented her because she was the youngest of the five.After the death of her mother, Mah’s father decided to remarry to a half European, half Chinese women whom the kids would call Niang (mother). Due to European culture being valued as high class in Chinese society, Niang viewed herself as better than the rest of the family and was uncontested in dominating the household. In her attempt to unspoil and teach the children important values, Niang set very strict rules on the children and would verbally and physically abuse them as punishment. Adeline vividly describes an instance during her primary school days, where Niang vigorously slapped her until her face was “stained with a mixture of tears and bloody mucus†because a couple of friends came to her house as a surprise (Mah 69). Due to the manipulative character of Niang, there was no hope for Mah to have a normal childhood where she could enjoy being a kid and feel supported by her parents.Even without the backbone of great parenting, Mah still managed to ignore discouragement and make something of her life primarily due to one person that did love her: her Aunt Baba. Aunt Baba provided her Adeline with comfort and made encouraged to take pride in her abilities and accomplishments. Because of her aunt’s protection and guidance, Adeline gained confidence in her academic ability and realized that education was a ticket to freedom away from her misery brought on by the rest of her family; Education was used as her motivation for a better life. As a result of her excellent academics, Adeline was eventually able to attend medical residency in the United States and establish an enjoyable life there.Mah’s writing style is more simple than complex, as she narrated her story from her past perspectives. Her language truly conveyed the intensity of her emotions at the time of the events, which allowed me to visualize the scenes well and understand how she really felt. There were times in the novel where Niang’s cruel actions toward Adeline infuriated me so much, that I physically wanted to punch her square in the face. Overall, this story is a reminder that if one has a strong will, they can overcome life’s challenges. It’s a story of perseverance. Thus, I suggest you read this book if you’re looking for motivation within your own life. After having read the circumstances Mah had to deal with, I realized not everyone has equal opportunity or privileges. Now, I am extremely grateful for certain aspects of life and freedoms I have, that Mah did not have. Everyone has problems with his or her own life; however, my problems seemed like minor issues in comparison to Mah’s ones. I feel that anyone that reads this book can a learn a lesson about adversity and feel inspired to accomplish their desires.
I found this book very interesting, but I also wanted to hit her up side the head for letting her Father & StepMother (after she was an established doctor) order her around so much. And I couldn't believe she cared that much into her later life. She needed to get psychological help to overcome needing her parents approval. She had a family of her own & she should have been putting her focus on on own family - not her crummy parents. But I know adults who were abused as children & the only way the got over it was through therapy. Abused children have a hard time overcoming that kind of treatment. It is sad.
Although this book was difficult at times to read, the author did keep me fascinated with her story. She has an ease of writing that very much feels as if she is having a conversation with the reader, and the book just flows.The story is one that is ageless: a man marries a woman and they have several children (in this case 5). When the youngest is born, the woman dies from complications, and the man in his loneliness quickly finds another woman to marry. He concerns himself more with outward appearances than with character, and ends up with wife #2 who is controlling, domineering, and wishes she had been wife #1 instead of wife #2. She really doesn't care for the fact that her husband has 5 children from wife #1, but no matter. Since her husband is weak and does as she wishes, she can treat them as she likes. Which isn't pleasant.Adeline is the youngest of the 5 siblings and therefore the recipient of not only her stepmother's wrath, but most often her 4 siblings as well. Unlike some children, Adeline never seems to truly stand up for herself, and that might be her personality or it might be cultural. Whatever it is, it defines her.Some reviewers here think Adeline is "whiny", especially after she reaches adulthood. Perhaps. However, if anyone knows somebody who was treated as though they were unwanted and/or unloved as a child - and my mother was such a one - then they might very well see the same behavior Adeline portrays as an adult.I thought this book was fascinating and a terrific tale of the healing power of the human spirit. At times I just wished I could have reached through the pages of this book and snatched Adeline away to a safe place where she could be nutured and feel safe.
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Download The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
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The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
Download The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
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About the Author
Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the National Humanities Medal, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For more than forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.
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Product details
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Counterpoint; Reprint edition (September 15, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 161902599X
ISBN-13: 978-1619025998
Product Dimensions:
7 x 1 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.8 out of 5 stars
37 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#48,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This is the classic expression of Wendell Berry's particular type of environmentalism, one that does not see agriculture as the problem, and pristine and untouched nature preserves as the solution, but specifically targets large-scale industrial agriculture. Berry exposes the many ways in which we pay more in hidden costs for our cheap and fattening "food" and how the industrial food system has not only wrecked our diet but families and communities in the process. Perhaps inadvertently Berry reveals what today's conservatives have missed, that there's a world of difference between multinational conglomerates that process corn into all sorts of by-products and food for beef cattle, and more local farms and businesses. The former breaks down communities, and the other (at least potentially) builds them up. One controls more of your life than you think, and the other hands your life and your freedom back to you. Berry's knowledgeable about all the old farming practices that many have forgotten, practices also promoted by Michael Pollan, that eliminate much or all of the need for external "inputs" such as fertilizer, pesticides and antibiotics. He has one foot in the past, and the other firmly planted in our future, hoping to bridge the gap.
Much of Wendell’s thinking struck a deep, long term cord with me. But I will state up front that , while I think he is absolutely right in so many fundamental ways, he is quixotic beyond any reality, and so represents a ‘lost, noble cause’. His basic premise is to decry modern technology’s inexorable lurch towards ‘efficiency’, what Spike South and I used to speak of as ‘the spirit of the hound’, the tendency of the technocracy to go after the jugular of an issue with fangs bared and no holds barred; no complex human dimensions need be considered. The growing efficiency is manifested in the legions of ‘experts and specialists’. Berry points out the modern person has become merely a ‘consumer’, who lives in a house built by a specialist, drives a car built by another specialist, eats food grown and processed by other specialists, and, after a day of work at his own specialty, comes home to be entertained by entertainment specialists on television. The consumer may live an entire life without eating any food he has produced or using a single item he has crafted. Berry focuses on the effects of specialization on U.S. agriculture, how its growth into ‘Agribusiness’, controlled by large corporations and, abetted by the Dept. of Agriculture and the land grant colleges, has virtually destroyed the equilibrium of traditional farming. Agribusiness is a sprawling industrial complex that includes the petrochemical industry for fertilizer and fuel, heavy equipment manufacturers of tractors and other machinery, processing, packaging, and transportation networks, and wealthy financial organizations that drive farmers into debt as they are forced to acquire the new technology or perish. At one point he calls modern farmers colonies of the petrochemical industry. He calls this technologically based agriculture ‘orthodox agriculture’. He bears especial animus towards former Sectretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, who he sees as having set the tone and propagandized for Agribusiness, ‘weaponizing food’, modulating international food supplies, and depopulating the agricultural population, driving those folks off their ancestral lands and into alienation and despair in the cities. He sees traditional farming, with a healthy dose of modern enlightenment, as the ideal; a farm that uses natural energy, that of the sun, of draft animals, of the earth, water, and of the farmers themselves, instead of full dependence on fossil fuel and heavy machinery. This farm has a multitude of crops and animals- not the unnatural monoculture touted by modern orthodoxy- uses crop rotation, animal manure as fertilizer, and other natural resources for buildings and farm operations. The orthodox, chemical farm treats animal manure as ‘toxic waste’ and so creates itself the problem of disposing of the waste instead of usefully composting it. By studying the few old fashioned remaining farms, with a special reverence for the Amish and their simple yet highly sophisticated and intelligent agricultural methods, Berry shows that productivity per acre on these traditional, manured farms, even using draft animals largely in place of tractors and other heavy machinery, is on a par with chemical farms. Furthermore, they are sustainable for generations, whereas chemical farms are not. What he doesn’t emphasize, however, is that the number of acres that can be managed per person by the traditional farm is far less than for the chemical farm. But from his perspective this is just as well, since he worries for all the rural people displaced to the cities; many could come back to the agricultural life if government land and agricultural policy were not so tilted against them. He invokes Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the U.S. populace as a multitude of small land freeholders, each with enough land to support a family and some modicum of commercial activity. Berry points out that there are many implicit assumptions in current policy, such as that, given the choice to work or not work, most people would rather not work at all. That education is only possible in schools, and not by experience, that thinking should be done in laboratories and offices, not by farmers themselves. That plants and animals, including humans, are machines, so that machine based agricultural is the most natural and desirable direction. In short, Berry sees an Amish lifestyle as the closest to a sustainable, community-oriented, organic healthiness for a society. He is imbued of the Judeo-Christian tradition so imputes morality to all our actions and activities, and believes in an absolute good, not moral relativism; absolute good is what produces sustainable, balanced health, in its broadest sense. This is both wonderful and unattainably quixotic. I have always appreciated the Amish for their values; hard, devout work, natural integration into Earth’s ecology, and let one not grow prosperous by one’s work, rather yet more devout.In much earlier years I had conspired with Spike South along such lines, albeit with not nearly the depth of thought or experience of Berry, that we should seek acreage, perhaps a hundred or so, possibly in the North Carolina or other mid-Atlantic state, and betake ourselves yonder, most likely with wives, to do exactly that. Begin self-sufficiency agriculture and building, creating a sustainable lifestyle, later with children to come. Instead of working out at the gym or jogging, the work itself would be the purposeful exercise for existence.Through the years, while still in the throes of ‘being a specialist’ (scientist, whatever), this yearning never ceased, while its realization remained impractical, what with the demands of orthodox specialization and family. But lo, after several decades the stars aligned such that it became possible to purchase a modest free holding in a rural area; we acquired thirty eight beautiful acres of Mississippi hardwood hills at a low cost. While un-natural – it is the product of urban wealth earned through specialization, and exported to the country- it is exhilarating. There is every opportunity to experiment with nature, with agriculture, with forestry, with watersheds, with building, with weather, the opportunity to learn and both succeed and fail. For me it is a joy to exert the body, sweat, pant, and groan at these labors, and fall delightfully weary into slumber at night. The artificiality, of course, is that it is all done as a homesteading hobby, yet with an economic anchor in specialty, in the city of New Orleans, so failures don’t lead to ruin.There are many, many movements and sub-currents throughout the U.S. trying to go against the monoculture, chemical farm. Farm to table, the locavore movement, school garden plots, and the like, all contest the hegemony of General Mills, Wendy’s, factory farms and the like. The locus of arguments against this is that, to sustain seven billion people on the planet the chemical farm is a necessity, and so it is actually selfish to think of re-personalizing agriculture, as billions could starve. Berry’s counter argument is that, no, productivity of sustainable, organic farming is on a par with chemical/heavy machinery farming so this dire outlook is untrue. However, for the organic, sustainable approach to work, a large part of the populace would have to become rural again. In Physics, the principle of least action, of a system falling into the lowest energy state available seems to apply well to humans. To demand that they endothermically trudge back up hill and work their bodies hard to feed themselves is like commanding water to flow upwards. Aint’ gonna happen. But gotta love Berry’s unbridled idealism.
Eye opening exposure of a fundamental human weakness for modern man. In the opening the author explains that the book is a criticism so if you're looking for immediate solutions or feel good stuff then don't read it. Here is a paragraph from page 20 that gets at the book's thrust.QUOTE TO ENDWe are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as a people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound. It is not just possible, it is altogether to be expected, that our society would produce conservationists who invest in stripmining companies, just as it must inevitably produce asthmatic executives whose industries pollute the air and vice-presidents of pesticide corporations whose children are dying of cancer. And these people will tell you that this is the way the "real world" works. They will pride themselves on their sacrifices for "our standard of living." They will call themselves "practical men" and "hardheaded realists." And they will have their justifications in abundance from intellectuals, college professors, clergymen, politicians. The viciousness of a mentality that can look complacently upon disease as "part of the cost" would be obvious to any child. But this is the "realism" of millions of modern adults.
In the opening chapter Berry talks about exploiters and nurturers and carries this theme throughout the book comparing "orthodox" and un-orthodox farming methods. He says: "The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible." He is talking about the difference between someone in an agribusiness, like an industrial farmer, and, for example, an Amish farmer. Berry offers the background and philosophical underpinnings of the state of agriculture today; this is as relevant in 2017 as it was 40 years ago when it was first published.
I know that The Unsettling of America is Berry's classic. But it just isn't my favorite. In my opinion, Berry's books "What Are People For?" and "Bringing it to the Table" are easier to read and more enjoyable.
Probably the most important book I've read in a long time - even more relevant today than it was when it was written. This book is a must read for anyone concerned about the economy, agriculture, our food system, the environment, or pretty much any American with a vested interest in this nation.
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