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jthhhhhhhh's review
4.0
Wendell Berry: my constant antidote to graduate school.
Berry dislikes scientific reductionism, argues for the uniqueness of art and religion as ways of knowing, being, doing, etc, and adds some important objections to the "scientific" enterprise as it is carried out today: it is essentially colonial, imperialist, and in bed with a number of environmentally destructive forces.
He also comes down pretty harshly on the way academic disciplines are organized and the way universities are run. This makes a lot of sense to me, but leaves me with some questions about how to proceed with my own chosen field. I am so surrounded by people who do research and scholarly publishing as their livelihood that I forget it's something I've never wanted.
Berry writes in another book, Standing by Words:
"If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole."
I'm knee-deep in theory about language and social worlds, yet too much of it, in the end, for me feels like a spinning out into nothing. It is not too late, perhaps, for me to imagine getting much more involved with language and literacy teaching at local, grassroots levels. For all our talk about the Local, currently fashionable ideas in applied linguistics seem rarely to be produced by scholars who are genuinely committed to living and working in a place, rather than an archipelago of universities.
Obviously, this book has provoked thinking beyond its subject. Which I suppose is another thing it has going for it.
Berry dislikes scientific reductionism, argues for the uniqueness of art and religion as ways of knowing, being, doing, etc, and adds some important objections to the "scientific" enterprise as it is carried out today: it is essentially colonial, imperialist, and in bed with a number of environmentally destructive forces.
He also comes down pretty harshly on the way academic disciplines are organized and the way universities are run. This makes a lot of sense to me, but leaves me with some questions about how to proceed with my own chosen field. I am so surrounded by people who do research and scholarly publishing as their livelihood that I forget it's something I've never wanted.
Berry writes in another book, Standing by Words:
"If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole."
I'm knee-deep in theory about language and social worlds, yet too much of it, in the end, for me feels like a spinning out into nothing. It is not too late, perhaps, for me to imagine getting much more involved with language and literacy teaching at local, grassroots levels. For all our talk about the Local, currently fashionable ideas in applied linguistics seem rarely to be produced by scholars who are genuinely committed to living and working in a place, rather than an archipelago of universities.
Obviously, this book has provoked thinking beyond its subject. Which I suppose is another thing it has going for it.
carol_indygardener's review
4.0
The four stars is probably more about my struggle to comprehend Berry than about the quality of his work, which is always excellent. I picked this book up at a local bookstore as one to read because I want to read books by the best authors out there, and Berry is definitely one of those. My favorite chapter was the last one titled "Conclusions". Here, in shorter snippets, I could better read and understand.
leucocrystal's review
4.0
"For the human necessity is not just to know, but also to cherish and protect the things that are known, and to know the things that are known, and to know the things that can be known only by cherishing. If we are to protect the world's multitude of places and creatures, then we must know them, not just conceptually but imaginatively as well."
I'm an Atheist with a background in the sciences, so I went into this one fully expecting to be challenged. And though it does introduce some tough concepts, in its way, I honestly can't disagree with any of it. The arts and sciences should be complementary, not at odds with one another, and community -- the maintaining of place and memory -- is just as important, if not more so, than innovation and ceaseless forward progress. Berry remains an extremely adept descriptor of his subjects.
I'm an Atheist with a background in the sciences, so I went into this one fully expecting to be challenged. And though it does introduce some tough concepts, in its way, I honestly can't disagree with any of it. The arts and sciences should be complementary, not at odds with one another, and community -- the maintaining of place and memory -- is just as important, if not more so, than innovation and ceaseless forward progress. Berry remains an extremely adept descriptor of his subjects.
aemy's review against another edition
1.0
It's been a while since I've read a Wendell Berry book. I think he is a deep, but narrow thinker (as evidenced by this essay being in response to a single book). He verges on a #tradlife ethic that makes me very uncomfortable, and I don't know how important he is to read in a world with Robin Wall Kimmerer. She has all the same questions, except more, and better answers.
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