The Need to Be Whole

By: Wendell Berry

Narrated by: Nick Offerman

Length: 19 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others.

Without historical understanding of this practice of dispossession—the displacement of Native peoples, the destruction of both the land and land-based communities, ongoing racial division—we are doomed to continue industrialism’s assault on both the natural world and every sacred American ideal. Berry writes, “To deal with so great a problem, the best idea may not be to go ahead in our present state of unhealth to more disease and more product development. It may be that our proper first resort should be to history: to see if the truth we need to pursue might be behind us where we have ceased to look.” If there is hope for us, this is it: that we honestly face our past and move into a future guided by the natural laws of affection. This book furthers Mr. Berry’s part in what is surely our country’s most vital conversation.

©2022 Wendell Berry (P)2022 Recorded Books

Exceptional.

Thank you Wendell Berry for this great effort. I will be forever changed by it.

Extraordinary

This book should be mandatory reading for everyone who calls themselves an American Window Barry has the purest and clearest vision of the dismantling of the American early culture

Required reading

I want to say this is required reading as a modern American, but it’s probably just required as a human being. There is of course a focus on distinctly American problems / shared history, but the scope of his diagnosis encapsulates all humankind and the way we see the living world around us as a whole. WB is a modern American poet, philosopher, and, in this work, spiritual physician.

Necessary Reading for These Troubled Times

No one but Nick Offerman could render this carefully reasoned and important book with the tenderness and depth and wit it so deserves.

It’s crucial that Wendell Berry be read and heard and taken to heart as it’s impossible to understand who we are as Americans — in all our hues and creeds, our dialects and ethnicities — without this kind of deep historical grounding. We all need to rediscover ourselves in terms of values.

We all need to be healed, as does the land we’ve taken and abused. To be made whole is at the base of the Greek word that gives us salvation.

This book — so clearsighted — left me feeling strangely uplifted, knowing myself to be so lucky to be in the presence of such loving and necessary genius

Uncommon candor, critical insights

It has been a blessed time of listening.
Deep reverencing of the earth. Imperative understanding of life.
Wendell Berry has the quality of teaching that I most admire.

Very detailed book

The author does a deep dive into the culture surrounding the issue and tells a great story.

A lot to think about

Whatever the book’s shortcomings — and there are some, including Berry’s admiration for Robert E. Lee — this is a thoughtful meditation on America, it’s past, present, and future. It will make you think, challenge at least some of your assumptions, and provoke deep reflection on the state of the United States today.

Always wonderful

As usual, Mr. Berry puts the thoughts in his mind into words for us to read. He says what others are not willing to say. This book will make all who read it better people that will love and appreciate all life.

Exceptional and culminating...

Having read Berry for nearly 25 years, it was a joy to hear his thinking as a man looking back yet living as much in the present as any. His unpacking of his thinking on our racial division is humble and offered as his own - inviting of further conversation. His reflections on work are challenging, inspiring, and needed in a moment as disconnected as ours. The last chapter, Words," felt like an intimate conversation, a bearing of his soul, a calling for us to live in reverence of and in service to life. I hope Berry continues to gift us with his voice.

a tour de force - a life changing book.

Wendell Berry makes a brilliant case for an overarching world view that manages to put political differences in context while presenting a life affirming philosophy. A wonderful book, beautifully read and totally engrossing.