The Need to Be Whole

By: Wendell Berry

Narrated by: Nick Offerman

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

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.

Berry is outstanding.

An incredibly thoughtful look at America: how we treat each other and our land. Wendell Berry at his finest.

Exceptional.

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

spot on

berry looked at the nuance of race... something no one else is doing. book is long