A poetic novel of despair, hope, and the redemptive power of work
deepens an award-winning author's grand Port Williams literary
project.
After losing his hand in an accident, Andy Catlett confronts an
agronomist whose surreal vision can see only industrial farming. This
vision is powerfully contrasted with that of modest Amish farmers
content to live outside the pressures brought by capitalist
postindustrial progress, and by working the land to keep away the three
great evils of boredom, vice, and need.
As Andy's perspective filters through his anger over his loss and the
harsh city of San Francisco surrounding him, he begins to remember: the
people and places that wait 2,000 miles away in his Kentucky home, the
comfort he knew as a farmer, and his symbiotic relationship to the soil.
Andy laments the modern shift away from the love of the land, even as he
begins to accept his own changed relationship to the world. Wendell
Berry's continued fascination with the power of memory continues in this
treasured novel set in 1976.
"[Berry's] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most
sustained contemporary articulation of America's agrarian, Jeffersonian
ideal." --Publishers Weekly
"Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always
of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware
participation in the arts of life." --The Bloomsbury Review
