Standing by Words Essays

In six essays, Wendell Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever-widening cleft between words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals from their communities and of their communities from the land. In thirty pages of the title essay, Berry considers two freshman English textbooks, Shelley, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, King Lear, Robert Herrick, the Bible, transcriptions of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Three-Mile Island crisis, an article on dairy cattle, R. Buckminster Fuller, Milton, Faulkner, and Lao Tzu, among others.--From publisher's description.