Wendell Berry (Hannah Coulter; Jayber Crow) is recognized as a good-natured outsider. In Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, Berry steps deliberately into a conversation about race and politics, fully aware of the attendant risk and responsibility. This book unites assertions Berry has worked with for years: the importance of local and loving care of the land; an insistence on neighborliness; and the possibility of justice and repair. Add to these the issue of race, and Berry speaks with unadorned honesty on the things that divide us, asserting, "I mean at least to tell the truth, as I am able to know it, about the difficulty of our problems."
Anticipating and even inviting opposition, Berry hopes for a dialogue where his "side of the conversation has been disagreement, pointed and plain, but expecting a reply equally pointed and plain." The strongest essay is "Work," in which Berry makes a connection between slavery and the subsequent degradation of manual labor that has made the right caretaking of the land nearly impossible, a set of damages that has harmed us all. He argues that "the fate of work and the fate of our country are the same. The wholeness of work is the same as the wholeness of the land and the people." Though lengthy, this book does not ramble; instead, each essay contributes to a cogent argument that will engage those readers genuinely interested in wrestling with impossible questions toward some possible future good. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian