Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture sounds like a read I would be interested in reading. Thanks for sharing so many! I also enjoy the excerpts and quotations included in your substacks. All the books mentioned sound like I’d enjoy them. Personally I’ve only read 2 books this year. One of which is Anthony Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential. It is beautifully and candidly written. It is drenched in kitchen and food culture, and was quite an emotional read for me as well on many levels. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in
Fiction recommendation: The Father's Tale by Michael O'Brien - a father goes on an international (mostly in Russia so lots of good literary and philosophical references) journey to save his son from a cult. Buckle up for this one, it's over 1000 pages
Nonfiction: With God in Russia by Fr. Walter Ciszek - an American Catholic priest's memoir of his time in Soviet captivity
I've been meaning to read more into Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker Movement - that's Christian anarchy in action. Or at least it was. It's still around today but seems to have lost a lot of influence/radicalism.
Chesterton/Belloc on culture and state - they formulated distributism as a middle ground to communism and laissez-faire capitalism - in essence, get the means of production into the people's hands instead of the state or the wealthy. I don't know if Berry was ever influenced by this but his ideas are certainly in the same vein. I have only read about distributism from secondary online sources so no book recs
Thanks for the recommendations! Definitely gonna have to check those out. Dorothy Day's autobiography is on my list for 2024 after I found it at a used bookstore a few weeks back.
I've wondered the same about Berry. Of course, no good literature is really unique. Streams of thought run through all great writers whether they knew each other or not.
Thanks for the recommendation! I do think you'd enjoy The Unsettling of America, and I think I'd enjoy hearing about the parts you disliked the most. Hah.
Agreeing with Berry too much had me laughing. The great, common situation for many!
Oh for sure! It takes effort to avoid letting someone as eloquent as Berry get in the way of developing our own convictions!
It is pretty much an impossibility.
For sure—I guess I was missing the word "unduly," lol. And even then...
This was my blunt and dry British humour response :)
Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture sounds like a read I would be interested in reading. Thanks for sharing so many! I also enjoy the excerpts and quotations included in your substacks. All the books mentioned sound like I’d enjoy them. Personally I’ve only read 2 books this year. One of which is Anthony Bourdain: Kitchen Confidential. It is beautifully and candidly written. It is drenched in kitchen and food culture, and was quite an emotional read for me as well on many levels. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in
Humanity and Food.
Fiction recommendation: The Father's Tale by Michael O'Brien - a father goes on an international (mostly in Russia so lots of good literary and philosophical references) journey to save his son from a cult. Buckle up for this one, it's over 1000 pages
Nonfiction: With God in Russia by Fr. Walter Ciszek - an American Catholic priest's memoir of his time in Soviet captivity
I've been meaning to read more into Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker Movement - that's Christian anarchy in action. Or at least it was. It's still around today but seems to have lost a lot of influence/radicalism.
Chesterton/Belloc on culture and state - they formulated distributism as a middle ground to communism and laissez-faire capitalism - in essence, get the means of production into the people's hands instead of the state or the wealthy. I don't know if Berry was ever influenced by this but his ideas are certainly in the same vein. I have only read about distributism from secondary online sources so no book recs
Thanks for the recommendations! Definitely gonna have to check those out. Dorothy Day's autobiography is on my list for 2024 after I found it at a used bookstore a few weeks back.
I've wondered the same about Berry. Of course, no good literature is really unique. Streams of thought run through all great writers whether they knew each other or not.
Thanks for the recommendation! I do think you'd enjoy The Unsettling of America, and I think I'd enjoy hearing about the parts you disliked the most. Hah.
And Merry Christmas.