The Nature of Things

My husband read this book recently and recommended it to me. I had just featured one of Wendell Berry's poems in my Poetry Sunday post , so I decided to put it ahead of the other books in my queue and read it. Nathan Coulter was Berry's first published book. It came out in 1960. It was also introductory to his "Port William" series which now stretches to ten books, the latest of which came out in 2012. It's a very short book, easily read in one sitting, or, as in my case, two relatively brief sittings. The book tells the story of the coming of age of a teenager named Nathan Coulter who lives with his older brother, Tom, and his parents on a farm in Kentucky. The major crop of the small farm is tobacco. The time frame of the events described is never really made clear but it seems to be perhaps sometime in the 1930s. It's apparent that this is a very poor area and the people who live there, the Coulters and their neighbors, are just barely getting by. The book...

Almost forty years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to the writing of a man from Kentucky named Wendell Berry. He thought that, with my interest in Nature, Berry would be a perfect fit for me. He was right. I have frequently dipped into Berry's writings over the years since then. He is a prolific writer of essays and poems, all of which have at their foundation the idea that people need to live at peace with their environment. As he wrote in 1969, "We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us." Wendell Berry has not only written in support of that assumption; he has lived his life as an example of that assumption. Now, the 79-year-old writer has been recognized for his life's work. He has been named recipient of the prestigious Dayton Literary Peace Prize...