THE NEED TO BE WHOLE

The acclaimed farmer, novelist, and environmental essayist considers—and grumbles about—our current racial reckonings.

Berry has been writing about race for much of his career. His 1970 book, The Hidden Wound, considered the impact of slavery and its aftereffects on the country in general and his native Kentucky in particular. In essence, his approach hasn’t changed. He still advocates for tightknit communities that are, if not actively agrarian, at least compassionate toward the environment; from there, he suggests, balms to many social ills will naturally arrive. This digressive, at times exhausting book is at best a well-meaning, eloquent utopian plea to abandon urbanity; at worst, it lapses into all-lives-matter rhetoric insisting that slavery and the Confederacy, while wrongheaded, were misunderstood. Berry finds recent efforts to remove Confederate monuments to be unhelpful, leading to an extended consideration of Robert E. Lee as “one of the great tragic figures of our history, who embodied and suffered in his personal life our national tragedy.” The author also argues that most Confederate soldiers were not necessarily White supremacists but rather unfairly maligned just-following-orders types. “Whatever there may have been of kindness in slavery does not excuse it,” he writes later, “and whatever was most cruel does not typify it.” In his effort to seek nuance in racial divisions, Berry risks being misunderstood, which he acknowledges. The deeper problem is that he cherry-picks where he goes looking for nuance. He laments the Great Migration without considering its causes; curiously, mentions Jim Crow only in passing; and laments the loss of Confederate statues but doesn’t consider the option of elevating other communities in their places. The hardworking Amish farm he describes certainly sounds lovely, but his prescription that we somehow build a country from that kind of model is as impractical as any bureaucratic approach he has railed against in the past.

A rambling and frustrating book from a normally reliable author.