Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #340715 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 359 pages

Customer Reviews

An extraordinary collection of essays.
In spite of the title (it comes from the chorus of "Dixie"), this book is not about the War, or a celebration of the Old South. It is rather a collection of essays in support of the Southern Agrarian movement centered at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and 30s. The unique thing about this book is the uniformly high literary quality of the essays. Take a look at the table of contents. One would be hard-pressed to find another collection of essays by such an ensemble of writers, poets, and historians. Anyone interested in who we are and how we got here as Americans should read this book.

The views expressed in this book may not ultimately make sense when considered from the point of view of an economist. Nonetheless, after reading it, you'll wonder whether there might not have been an alternative to either the brutal, dehumanizing calculations of the socialists in their various guises, or the materialistic worship of progress and the almighty dollar that capitalism brings us. It is a book with an old-fashioned humanism and dignity that is seldom encountered anymore. The modern reader may be startled, for example, to be presented with the idea that education is something more than the vocational training it is today, but rather a course of personal development in which the pupil comes to understand his place and role in society, in which the pupil becomes cultured, if you will. Nowadays, "culture" means that we play Mozart to our children in utero, so that when ill-mannered little Brandon grows up, he'll be one leg up on the competition for that lucrative securities analyst job on Wall Street.

I can well remember reading "The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius", from this book, in school growing up. Many of the essays stick with you, and stand up to multiple re-readings.

Even if you don't agree with a call for a return to a rural, agrarian society (and I don't, but even that fact makes me sad after I read this book), it's well worth reading.

A retrospective glace at our future
The south as a region with a distinct culture and way of life is the subject of this fascinating book. It includes essays by some of the great literary minds of the mid century -- Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson -- and it speaks to the great traumas unleashed by industrialism on southern culture and traditional local communities. Many memorable lines and some beautiful writing are contained within. Ransom argues that American society, in the guise of progress, was waging an unrelenting war against nature. Lytle reminds us that prophets do not come to us from cities encouraging us to buy new clothes, but rather come from the wilderness stinking of goats. The southerners here were burdened with a racial legacy that undercut their view for a time, but their basic point remains just as valid today -- do we as a society really benefit from destroying local communities, losing respect for tradition and nature, and disrupting our cherished ways of life? Carson, Toffler and Pirsig will remind us that these "romantic" southerners were actually raising important issues about the kind of culture and society we will bequeath to future generations. A proper respect for land and soil is a deep rooted American idea. It is put forward with poetry and skill by these writers. The great urban turmoils of later decades: the break up of the American family, the flight of black Americans to cities that would leave them abandoned, the great losses in nature; all of this is part of the tragedy wrought by industrialism and modernity which these writers, and others (Eliot, Chesterton) warned. This is not to suggest that this is a programatic book -- it is a poetic insight that finds a noble follower in Wendell Berry. It is an important piece of work, and not so dated as some might wish.

Chillingly prophetic classic, must read for all Southerners
The footnotes of so many books about the South reference this book that a visit to the source was inevitable. This book captures the best and worst of our Southern heritage. It is not a prescription for economics. It was environmental before the term was coined. It also portrays with poetic beauty at times the organic symmetry of a kinder gentler time when people were in tune with the rythmns of nature. Some of the essays are better than others and a couple are outright tomes. But there is a reason it has always been visited by any serious student of the South.