From the dust jacket: 

Wendell Berry is one of America's most valued cultural critics. Since 1960 he has embarked on a long conversation with its citizens: a developing, thorough critique often angry and always hopeful. As he notes in the preface to this latest installment, "The work that I feel best about I have done as a amateur: for love. But in my essays especially I have been motivated also by fear of our violence to one another and to the world,and by my hope that we might do better. If I had not been so reasonably afraid, my essays at least would have been much different and many fewer." These new essays set aside abstraction in favor of clarity, coherence, and passion, an important new collection that argues for affection and care in this time of loss and profound danger. And in an unusual departure, Mr. Berry has included two essays by colleagues Daniel Kemmis and Courtney White, both at work, in quite different ways,on the issues at hand. This whole book , one of the finest in Wendell Berry's long career, offers an exhilarating call to action.

"Leadership passes into empire; empire begets insolence; insolence brings ruin." William Carlos Williams, Patterson I

Cover design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc. Calligraphy by Christine Colasurdo. 180 pages.

Contents:

Preface

Part I

Secrecy vs. Rights
Contempt for Small Places
Rugged Individualism
We Have Begun
Some Notes for the Kerry Campaign, If Wanted
Compromise, Hell!
Charlie Fisher

Part II

Imagination in Place
The Way of Ignorance
The Purpose of a Coherent Community
Quantity vs. Form
Renewing Husbandry
Agriculture from the Roots Up
Local Knowledge in the Age of Information
The Burden of the Gospels

Part III

Letter to Daniel Kemmis
Daniel Kemmis Replies
The Working Wilderness: A Call for a Land Health Movement, by Courtney White