The World-Ending Fire

The Essential Wendell Berry

By: Wendell Berry

Narrated by: Nick Offerman

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. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.

With grace and conviction, Wendell Berry shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy - the natural world will not allow it.

Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

©2018 Wendell Berry (P)2020 Recorded Books

Amazing in everyway

Great narrative
great voice
s great literature
make Wendell berry a saint, a hero for us commoners.

Vital. Timely. Timeless.

Cannot recommend this highly enough. Relevant, piercing wisdom emanating from carefully observed lived experience. More important now than ever before. A revelation.

Nick Offerman is perfect.

Hope to change the area we live in

Beautifully sobering. We don’t know what we had til it’s gone. Makes me want to live on a farm with with my multigenerational family! We must return to the land.

A bracing, inspiring glimpse into a sane worldview

Much gratitude to Wendell Berry for all his work. Here you are invited to consider a careful, "care-full" perspective of a truly compassionate and wise person's thoughts, especially on our relationship with the matural world we are intimately a part of, and of the modern world's and mindset's broken relationship to it, and by extension to reality as a whole. Beautiful; much thanks to Paul Kingsnorth as well for organizing these essays and to Nick Offerman for providing an eminently appropriate voice, aligning his tones of bracing truth-telling with a gentle kindness and long-gestating thoughtfulness amd intelligence that reverberates with true care and love for what is most appropriately loved even when most critical of our society's many ills. Has certainly inspired me to take concrete steps toward responsible local food production as the very least I can do to help heal our world.

For radical responsibility

I constantly question the world and times in which I live - what we are told, what we do, and the short and long term repercussions of our actions and the actions of those around us. I also collect quotes that summarize points more succinctly than I could dream of producing.

This book is worth buying the physical copy. He covered a wide range of topics, all with the skill of cutting to the heart of the matter, asking the hard questions, pointing out hypocrisy where it lies, and offering solutions that a man or woman can implement should they choose. Mr. Berry made it clear, often and repeatedly, that we have a choice, and put that responsibility on himself and the reader rather than continue to trust the government to fix the problems. Deep philosophy, sociology, and social/economical/environmental responsibility that is what *should* be taught in schools, but is up to the reader to seek out and share.

So, I found myself laboring with my technological device to bookmark quotes and whole sections that would have been easier saved to share with a friend had I bought the physical book. Case in point, his essay on "Why I will not buy a computer." This is the kind of book that should be dog-eared, much and often loved, ready at hand for an afternoon or 10 minutes of reading, and would make an excellent gift to old hippies, young people who somehow know that this ain't normal, or just someone you suspect is questioning the authority of mass media and consumer culture. But buy the hard copy - I feel that the hard copy speaks even more loudly the message that Wendell Berry puts down.