Wendell Berry lives with his wife and two children on a hillside farm on the Kentucky River near Port Royal, Kentucky. In his writing he has particularized his land and his home as fully as Jesse Stuart, Kentucky's poet laureate, has particularized W-Hollow. Like Stuart, Berry lives--by choice--within a few miles of where his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents lived and worked. His work is of a place, and whether he writes poems, novels, or essays, he reveals his preoccupation with the land and his sense of culture as derived from his acceptance of a way of life many people today regard as "alternative." Struggling to achieve forms that will allow him to make what he calls "comprehensive sense," Berry examines the historical and ethical implications of people's relationships to the land and to other living creatures. Like the Eastern mystic and like the popular novelist Kurt Vonnegut...