Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
by Wendell Berry
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Book Summary Information
Author: Wendell BerryEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-05
ISBN: 1582431418
Number of pages: 176
Publisher: Counterpoint
Book Reviews of Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
Book Review: I'm on the fence
Summary: 3 Stars
This book certainly creates controversy as the disparate ratings from one to five stars illustrates. If nothing else, that says something very good about it as a book. Indeed the ratings seem to be more along the lines of agreeing or disagreeing with Berry's ideas, rather than the usual standard I apply: how much of my short allotment of time and restricted stack of cash should be spent on a book. I think of most of my reviews along those lines, instead of engaging in a dialect with the author. Now, that being said, I really need to say I am deviating from that practice because although I think this is a five star should read (agree with Berry's updated C.P. Snow Two Cultures or not, spiritualism vs techno-engineeering or not) as a discussion centre, I think there are some writerly considerations: Berry is a poet, a much greater poet than many realize. Like other definers of an age - unacknowledged legislators true but subsequently recognized - his audience does not always realize the way his mind works words around. In his poetry a sort of slow dawning comes on the reader who does not force things along. Brisk walks in his woods will not do, instead the multiple shades of green, the distinct notes of each birdsong, the subtle shifts of a breeze on the face constitute an experience, a miracle of life. That goes on in this prose arguement as well. Reading him for a concise debate just will not work. I guess what I am saying is that the underlying premise is the undeniable point that for all of sciencethere is no such substance as life. But it's still there and that's the miracle and that's the poetry and the rational, logical, orderly prose of an essay does not manifest the miracle that is poetry. But I am thankful there is a Wendell Berry writing such books to make me think. Spend a few bucks, do some pondering, but in the end go to his poems.
Summary of Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
One of America's most respected and celebrated writers provides a thought-provoking analysis of, and a concise rebuttal of, E. O. Wilson's Consilience"[A] scathing assessment...Berry shows that Wilson's much-celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science...Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today."-Lauren F. Winner, Washington Post Book World
"I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself...A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism."-Colin C. Campbell, Christian Science Monitor
"Berry takes a wrecking ball to E. O. Wilson's Consilience, reducing its smug assumptions regarding the fusion of science, art, and religion to so much rubble."-Kirkus Reviews
In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world.
As a poet, novelist, and farmer, Wendell Berry has worked and written in favor of tried and tested ways, rejecting the notion that the modern is always to be preferred over the old. Technology may have its uses, he has insisted in books like The Gift of Good Land, but what matters more is the crafting of sound human communities and of self-reliant living. Religious faith lies at the heart of Berry's unapologetically old-fashioned program. Faith, which supposes that life is full of unpredictable mysteries, stands against much of modern science, an opposition that Berry explores in Life Is a Miracle. Taking particular issue with entomologist E.O. Wilson's recent book, Consilience, which maintains the supremacy of scientific explanation over religious conjecture and supposes that science will one day be able to answer every question about the hows and whys of life, Berry revisits C.P. Snow's "two cultures" thesis to observe that science and religion address different kinds of necessary questions. "Science cannot replace art or religion," he writes, "for the same reason that you cannot loosen a nut with a saw or cut a board in two with a wrench." Against science's "false specification and pretentious exactitude," Berry notes quietly that the more he observes his own little corner of the planet, a small Kentucky farm, the less patient he is with reductionist, materialist explanations of the way things work--for here, and everywhere, "life ... is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated."
Berry's slender essay offers a thoughtful repudiation of an increasingly technological--and, some would say, soulless--culture. --Gregory McNamee
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