From the Back Cover:

"Berry has produced one of the most humane, honest, liberating works of our time. It is a beautiful book. More than that, it has become at one stroke an essential book. Every American who can read at all should read it." Hayden Carruth, The Village Voice

"The brunt of this book is to wake us up, page after page, from stupidity. 'It is a kind of death,' Montaigne said, 'to avoid the pain of well doing, or trouble of well living.' Wendell Berry makes that observation rip the air like an alarm clock." Guy Davenport, Life Magazine

"A profound, passionate, crucial piece of writing... Few readers, and I think, no writers will be able to read it without a small pulse of triumph at the temples: the strange, almost communal sense of triumph one feels when someone has written truly well... The statement it makes is intricate and beautiful, sad but strong." Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post

"One of the most touching and true personal testaments concerned with our country's racial dilemma." Publisher's Weekly

"One of the most impressive aspects of Berry's book is the authentic simplicity of his style, the directness with which that style can accomodate Tolstoy, Malcolm X, work songs, anecdotes, speculation, and polemic indignation... The strength of this book is its connecting America's two major problems: the exploiting of men and land; it deserves as wide an audience as possible." Joan Joffe Hall, Louisville Courier-Journal

Cover design: David Bullen. 137 pages.

First Sentence:

It occurs to me that, for a man whose life from the beginning has been conditioned by the lives of black people, I have had surprisingly little to say about them in my other writings.