Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

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  Andy Catlett: Early Travels

  Wendell Berry

  At nine years old, Andy Catlett takes his first journey by himself, by bus, to visit his grandparents during the Christmas of 1943.

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  Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

  Wendell Berry

  Wendell Berry proposes, and earnestly hopes, that people will learn once more to care for their local communities, and so begin a restoration that might spread over our entire nation and beyond. The renewed development of local economies would help preserve rural diversity despite the burgeoning global economy that threatens to homogenize and compromise communities all over the world. From modern health care to the practice of forestry, from local focus to national resolve, Berry argues, there can never be a separation between global ecosystems and human communities - the two are intricately connected; the health and survival of one depends upon the other. Another Turn of the Crank reaches to the heart of Berry's concern and vision for the future, for America and for the world.

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  A Part: Poems

  Wendell Berry

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  A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership

  Wendell Berry

  A collection of twenty short stories about Port William, a mythical town on the banks of the Kentucky River, populated over the years by a cast of unforgettable characters living in a single place over a long time

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  A Place on Earth: A Novel

  Wendell Berry

  Mat Feltner struggles to accept the loss of his son as the rest of the Port William community watches the progress of World War II.

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  A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997

  Wendell Berry

  For more than two decades, Wendell Berry has spent his Sunday mornings in a kind of walking meditation, observing the world and writing poems. This volume gathers all of these poems written to date.

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  A World Lost: A Novel

  Wendell Berry

  At the age of 60, a Kentucky man decides to find out why half a century earlier his favorite uncle was shot, a crime for which the killer spent only two years in jail. The man was nine years old when the incident occurred and nobody would give him a reason.

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  Blessed are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings About Love, Compassion and Forgiveness

  Wendell Berry

  For two thousand years, artists, social and cultural activists, politicians and philosophers, humanists and devoted spiritual seekers have all looked to the sayings of Jesus for inspiration and instruction. Unfortunately, on occasions too frequent and destructive to enumerate, the teachings of Christ have been either ignored or distorted by the very people calling themselves Christian. Today, we see a vigorous movement in America fueled by a politicized and engaged portion of the electorate involved in just such ignorance and distortion. Whether directed towards social intolerance or attitudes of warlike aggression, these right-wing citizens have claimed a power of influence that far exceeds their numbers.
  
  This small book collects the sayings of Jesus, selected by Mr. Berry, who has contributed an essay of introduction. Here is a way of peace as described and directed by the greatest spiritual teacher in the West. This is a book of inspiration and prayerful compassion, and we may hope a ringing call to action at a time when our country and the world it once led stand at a dangerous crossroads.

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  Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food

  Wendell Berry

  Long before organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Wendell Berry was farming and writing with the purity of food in mind. For the last five decades, he has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of Berry's influence, Michael Pollan offers an introduction to this new collection. "To read the essays in this sparkling anthology," he writes, "many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, is to realize just how little of what we are saying and hearing today Wendall Berry hasn't already said, bracingly before."

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  Citizenship Papers: Essays

  Wendell Berry

  The novelist, poet, and essayist presents a collection of twenty essays that offer everything from critiques of the American experience to a celebration of ordinary lives to a determined warning about the future of the country.

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  Clearing

  Wendell Berry

  A collection of poems, all between four and fourteen pages in length, that deal with stewardship of the earth in general and more specifically with the caring for a farm.

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  Entries: Poems

  Wendell Berry

  Entries is Wendell Berry's tenth collection of poems. This remarkable, eclectic gathering of ten years' work offers poems of remembrance and renewal, celebrating life's complexities from the domestic to the eternal. As husband and father, son and citizen, the poet explores with clear sureness his "membership" in his community and in the world. The heart of this collection is a sequence of poems written during Berry's father's final years. From conflict, grief, great loss and great love, there emerges a compassion and understanding: in death and in memory begins immortality.

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  Farming: A Hand Book

  Wendell Berry

  The America many people would like to believe in is convincingly explored in this volume of poems by a writer close to the heart of things. The sanity and eloquence of these poems spring from the land in Kentucky where Wendell Berry was born, married, lives, farms, and writes. From classic pastoral themes both lyrical and reflective, to a verse play, to a dramatic narrative and the manic, entertaining, prescient ravings of Berry’s Mad Farmer, these poems show a unity of language and consciousness, skill and sensitivity, that has placed Wendell Berry at the front rank of contemporary American poets.

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  Fidelity: Five Stories

  Wendell Berry

  Stories that explore the love, trust and wisdom of ordinary people.

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  Given: Poems

  Wendell Berry

  For the past 25 years award-winning writer Wendell Berry has been at work on "The Sabbath Poems," resulting from his Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation. Poems from the past eight years of these walks are included in Given. Also featured is "Sonata at Payne Hollow," a play in verse that is a startling evocation of the lives of the painters Harlan and Anna Hubbard. The other half of this collection contains shorter occasional pieces, from political poems to folk sayings, love poems to celebrations.

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  Hannah Coulter: A Novel

  Wendell Berry

  In the latest installment in Wendell Berry's long story about the citizens of Port William, Hannah Coulter remembers. Her first husband, Virgil, was declared "missing in action" shortly after the Battle of the Bulge, and after she married Nathan Coulter about all he could tell Hannah about the Battle of Okinawa was "Ignorant boys, killing each other." The community was stunned and diminished by the war, with some of its sons lost forever and others returning home determined to carry on. Now, in her late seventies, twice-widowed and alone, Hannah sorts through her memories: of her childhood, of young love and loss, of raising children and the changing seasons. She turns her plain gaze to a community facing its long deterioration, where, she says, "We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other." Hannah offers her summation: her stories and her gratitude, for the membership in Port William, and for her whole life, a part of the great continuum of love and memory, grief and strength.

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  Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work

  Wendell Berry

  Berry chronicles the lives of Harlan Hubbard, with his wife Anna, as they lived on a houseboat for several years and later in a small cabin on the banks of the Ohio River. Their earthy and calm philosophy was expressed through Harlan's long-running journal and his paintings.

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  Home Economics: Fourteen Essays

  Wendell Berry

  My work has been motivated," Wendell Berry has written, "by a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place." In Home Economics, a collection of fourteen essays, Berry explores this process and continues to discuss what it means to make oneself "responsibly at home." His title reminds us that the very root of economics is stewardship, household management. To paraphrase Confucius, a healthy planet is made up of healthy nations that are simply healthy communities sharing common ground, and communities are gatherings of households. A measure of the health of the planet is economics--the health of its households. Any process of destruction or healing must begin at home. Berry speaks of the necessary coherence of the "Great Economy," as he argues for clarity in our lives, our conceptions, and our communications.

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  Imagination in Place: Essays

  Wendell Berry

  In Imagination in Place, we travel to the local cultures of several writers important to Berry's life and work, from Wallace Stegner's great West and Ernest Gaines' Louisiana plantation life to Donald Hall's New England, and on to the Western frontier as seen through the Far East lens of Gary Snyder. Berry laments today's dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and literary sense.

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  It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays

  Wendell Berry

  When he accepted the invitation to deliver The Jefferson Lecture—our nation’s highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement—Wendell Berry decided to take on the obligation of thinking again about the problems that have engaged him throughout his long career. He wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair and healing even in these times of Late Capitalism and its destructive contagions. As a poet and writer he understood already that much can be gleaned from looking at the vocabulary of these problems themselves and how we describe them. And he settled on “affection” as a method of engagement and solution.

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  Jayber Crow: A Novel

  Wendell Berry

  Jayber Crow, born in Goforth, Kentucky, orphaned at age ten, began his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College. There, freedom met with new burdens and a young man needed more than a mirror to find himself. But the beginning of that finding was a short conversation with "Old Grit," his profound professor of New Testament Greek. "You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time."
  "And how long is that going to take?"
  "I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps."
  "That could be a long time."
  "I will tell you a further mystery," he said. "It may take longer."
  
  Eventually, after the flood of 1937, Jayber becomes the barber of the small community of Port William, Kentucky. From behind that barber chair he lives out the questions that drove him from seminary and begins to accept the gifts of community that enclose his answers. The chair gives him a perfect perch from which to listen, to talk, and to see, as life spends itself all around. In this novel full of remarkable characters, he tells his story that becomes the story of his town and its transcendent membership.

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  Leavings: Poems

  Wendell Berry

  No one writes like Wendell Berry. Whether essay, novel, story, or poem, his inimitable voice rings true, as natural as the land he has farmed in Kentucky for over 40 years. Following the widely praised Given, this new collection offers a masterful blend of epigrams, elegies, lyrics, and letters, with the occasional short love poem. Alternately amused, outraged, and resigned, Berry's welcome voice is the constant in this varied mix. The book concludes with a new sequence of Sabbath poems, works that have spawned from Berry's Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation. Berry's themes are reflections of his life: friends, family, the farm, the nature around us as well as within. He speaks strongly for himself and sometimes for the lost heart of the country. As he has borne witness to the world for eight decades, what he offers us now in this new collection of poems is of incomparable value.

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  Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

  Wendell Berry

  In Life is a Miracle, Wendell Berry urges us to begin a "conversation out of school." Believing we are on a course of arrogant and dangerous behavior in science and other intellectual disciplines, this proclamation against modern superstition recommends a shift in priorities and goals. Berry observes, "it is clearly bad for the sciences and the arts to be divided into 'two cultures.' It is bad for scientists to be working without a sense of obligation to cultural tradition. It is bad for artists and scholars in the humanities to be working without a sense of obligation to the world beyond the artifacts of culture." They must be the subjects of one complex conversation.

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  Nathan Coulter: A Novel

  Wendell Berry

  This, the first title in the Port William series, introduces the rural section of Kentucky with which novelist Wendell Berry has had a lifelong fascination. When young Nathan loses his grandfather, Berry guides readers through the process of Nathan's grief, endearing the reader to the simple humanity through which Nathan views the world. Echoing Berry's own strongly held beliefs, Nathan tells us that his grandfather's life "couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields."

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  New Collected Poems

  Wendell Berry

  In New Collected Poems, Berry reprints the nearly two hundred pieces in Collected Poems, along with the poems from his most recent collections—Entries, Given, and Leavings—to create an expanded collection.