-
The Need to Be Whole
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 19 hrs and 54 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $25.79
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
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.
Featured Article: Best of the Year—The 12 Best History Listens of 2022
We’ve noticed—and applaud—a trend in our members' preferences for history: Audible listeners want to hear about events of the past with both discipline and nuance. You want authoritative synthesis and reliable facts, but also to hear about people's lived experience, preferably in novelistic detail. And all of us love some juicy reconstruction from time to time. This year, we picked the best performances to fill that tall order.
More from the same
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The World-Ending Fire
- The Essential Wendell Berry
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 16 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work.
-
-
Vital. Timely. Timeless.
- By David M. on 06-15-20
By: Wendell Berry
-
The Unsettling of America
- Culture & Agriculture
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land - from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
-
-
love the material, meh on the performance.
- By Fireham on 07-10-20
By: Wendell Berry
-
A Place on Earth
- A Novel
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The rhythms of this novel are the rhythms of the land. A Place on Earth resonates with variations played on themes of change; looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found.
-
-
Oh my, what a great book
- By Molly-o on 10-21-11
By: Wendell Berry
-
Fidelity
- Five Stories
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Lyle Blaker
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return listeners to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight-knit community within.
By: Wendell Berry
-
Nathan Coulter
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This, the first title in the Port William series, introduces the rural section of Kentucky with which novelist Wendell Berry has had a lifelong fascination. When young Nathan loses his grandfather, Berry guides listeners through the process of Nathan's grief, endearing the listener to the simple humanity through which Nathan views the world.
-
-
Beautifully written, well read
- By Jenna Moon on 08-16-10
By: Wendell Berry
-
The Memory of Old Jack
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values of Americans strive to recapture as we arrive at the next century.
-
-
Beautiful Appreciation of Life
- By D. Farnham on 04-28-09
By: Wendell Berry
-
The World-Ending Fire
- The Essential Wendell Berry
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 16 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work.
-
-
Vital. Timely. Timeless.
- By David M. on 06-15-20
By: Wendell Berry
-
The Unsettling of America
- Culture & Agriculture
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land - from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
-
-
love the material, meh on the performance.
- By Fireham on 07-10-20
By: Wendell Berry
-
A Place on Earth
- A Novel
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The rhythms of this novel are the rhythms of the land. A Place on Earth resonates with variations played on themes of change; looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found.
-
-
Oh my, what a great book
- By Molly-o on 10-21-11
By: Wendell Berry
-
Fidelity
- Five Stories
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Lyle Blaker
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return listeners to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight-knit community within.
By: Wendell Berry
-
Nathan Coulter
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This, the first title in the Port William series, introduces the rural section of Kentucky with which novelist Wendell Berry has had a lifelong fascination. When young Nathan loses his grandfather, Berry guides listeners through the process of Nathan's grief, endearing the listener to the simple humanity through which Nathan views the world.
-
-
Beautifully written, well read
- By Jenna Moon on 08-16-10
By: Wendell Berry
-
The Memory of Old Jack
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values of Americans strive to recapture as we arrive at the next century.
-
-
Beautiful Appreciation of Life
- By D. Farnham on 04-28-09
By: Wendell Berry
-
Natural Gifts
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Michael Toms
- Length: 55 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Join us for an hour of wisdom from one of the most highly respected of modern American writers and poets. Using words like "affection", "satisfaction", "care", and "joy", Berry calls for a re-evaluation of the basic values and practices of our lives. He illustrates his ideas with glimpses of his own life and those of his Kentucky farm neighbors, and describes a future where we can learn to find love, wisdom and meaning in the people, the places and the work of our own daily lives.
-
-
Profound and rich with insight. Simple
- By E. Faison on 07-21-18
By: Wendell Berry
-
Watch with Me
- And Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Lyle Blaker
- Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that—with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers—here approaches the Shakespearean.
By: Wendell Berry
-
Daily Bread
- By: Wendell Berry
- Narrated by: Michael Toms
- Length: 52 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Farmer, ecologist, and writer Berry provides some rich and fertile ground for recreating life and culture. He speaks of enduring values, the wholeness of life and the interdependence of all creatures, especially humankind. Berry's self-discipline, ethical sense and human compassion come through as he leads us from the microcosm of his Kentucky hill farm to the macrocosm of a sane and reasoned planetary vision based on personal integrity, faithfulness, and love.
-
-
Old Interview without the usual Berry inspiration
- By Isaac Whiting on 06-11-12
By: Wendell Berry
-
Where the Deer and the Antelope Play
- The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside
- By: Nick Offerman
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A humorous and rousing set of literal and figurative sojourns as well as a mission statement about comprehending, protecting, and truly experiencing the outdoors, fueled by three journeys undertaken by actor, humorist, and New York Times best-selling author Nick Offerman
-
-
By far his worst work to date.
- By Aron on 10-21-21
By: Nick Offerman
-
The Sign of Jonas
- By: Thomas Merton
- Narrated by: Tom McElroy
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Begun five years after he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, The Sign of Jonas is an extraordinary view of Merton's life in a Trappist monastery, and it serves also as a spiritual log recording the deep meaning and increasing sureness he felt in his vocation: the growth of a mind that finds in its contracted physical world new intellectual and spiritual dimensions.
By: Thomas Merton
-
Wendell Berry and the Given Life
- By: Ragan Sutterfield, Bill Mckibben - foreword
- Narrated by: Ragan Sutterfield
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the past 50 years, Wendell Berry has been helping seekers chart a return to the practice of being creatures. Through his essays, poetry, and fiction, Berry has repeatedly drawn our attention to the ways in which our lives are gifts in a whole economy of gifts. Berry presents us with the sort of coherent vision for the lived moral and spiritual life that we need now. His work helps us remember our givenness and embrace our life as creatures.
-
-
The Narrator is extremely ........ frustrating
- By carly forward on 08-23-17
By: Ragan Sutterfield, and others
-
The Farmer's Wife
- My Life in Days
- By: Helen Rebanks
- Narrated by: Esmée Cook, Helen Rebanks
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Helen Rebanks’s beautifully written memoir takes place across a single day on her working farm in the Lake District of England. Weaving past and present, through a journey of self-discovery, the book takes us from the farmhouse table of her grandmother and into the home she now shares with her husband, four kids, and an abundance of animals. Helen shares, with rare truthfulness, her life in days, sometimes a wonder and a joy but others a grind to be survived. It’s a story about food and love; the need we all have for simple, honest, nourishing dishes and relationships.
-
-
What a pair and partner to The Shepherd’s Life!
- By Wendy on 11-07-23
By: Helen Rebanks
-
The Metaphysical Club
- A Story of Ideas in America
- By: Louis Menand
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea.
-
-
Hands down the best non fiction book I've read
- By Bryan Decker on 01-15-20
By: Louis Menand
-
The Farmer's Wife
- My Life in Days
- By: Helen Rebanks
- Narrated by: Verity Henry
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As dawn breaks on the farm, Helen Rebanks makes a mug of tea, relishing the few minutes of quiet before the house stirs. Within the hour the sounds of her husband, James, and their four children will fill the kitchen. There are also six sheepdogs, two ponies, 20 chickens, 50 cattle and 500 sheep to care for. Helen is a farmer's wife. Hers is a story that is rarely told, despite being one we think we know. Weaving past and present, Helen shares the days that have shaped her.
-
-
The authentic voice of the author.
- By Michael on 03-06-24
By: Helen Rebanks
-
All Rise
- Audio Perambulation
- By: Nick Offerman
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 1 hr and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Nick Offerman's view, we as a country can be doing a better job when it comes to decency. While most of the country has spent the last few years fighting about everything from politics to the existence of science, there are some things we can all agree about, like that we only really need one flavor of Oreo cookies. And that despite all the challenges we're currently facing, America can get it together if we can, simply, rise above it all, and admit that a lot what we're fighting about is actually pretty stupid, especially when told in Nick's signature comedic voice.
-
-
Thank you The Daily Show!
- By Corbet on 10-16-20
By: Nick Offerman
-
On Politics
- A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present
- By: Alan Ryan
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 46 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Both a history and an examination of human thought and behavior spanning three thousand years, On Politics thrillingly traces the origins of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Machiavelli in Book I and from Hobbes to the present age in Book II. Whether examining Lord Acton's dictum that "absolute power corrupts absolutely" or explicating John Stuart Mill's contention that it is "better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied," Alan Ryan evokes the lives and minds of our greatest thinkers in a way that makes hearing about them a transcendent experience.
-
-
A concise overview for curious laymen
- By Amazon Customer on 01-07-23
By: Alan Ryan
-
The Enlightenment That Failed
- Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748-1830
- By: Jonathan I. Israel
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 60 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Enlightenment That Failed explores the growing rift between those Enlightenment trends and initiatives that appealed exclusively to elites and those aspiring to enlighten all of society by raising mankind's awareness, freedoms, and educational level generally. Jonathan I. Israel explains why the democratic and radical secularizing tendency of the Western Enlightenment, after gaining some notable successes during the revolutionary era (1775-1820) in numerous countries, especially in Europe, North America, and Spanish America, ultimately failed.
-
-
Enlightened radical
- By Anonymous User on 07-02-22
Love Books? You'll Love Audible.
Transform your day
Replace endless scrolling with endless listening. Chores can be fun.
Listen everywhere
Download titles to listen offline, wherever you are in the world.
Carry your entire Library
Your stories go where you go. Audiobooks don’t weigh a thing.
Listen and learn
Discover stories that can change your mind, your well-being, and your life.
Reach your reading goals
You can’t turn pages while you drive—but you can press play.
Find your niche
WIth thousands of titles to explore, there’s something for everyone.
What listeners say about The Need to Be Whole
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Susan C.
- 04-27-23
Exceptional.
Thank you Wendell Berry for this great effort. I will be forever changed by it.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- David D.
- 06-01-23
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
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jacob
- 01-18-24
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.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jane Vandenburgh
- 11-05-22
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
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
10 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Ann K. Werner
- 02-09-23
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.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- J. Pat Rick
- 05-05-23
Very detailed book
The author does a deep dive into the culture surrounding the issue and tells a great story.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Christopher
- 12-11-22
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.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous
- 12-30-23
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.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Michael A. Williams
- 12-16-22
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.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Michael Conley, Ed.D.
- 01-27-23
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.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!