He is unlike anybody else writing today ... After Donald Trumps election we urgently need to rediscover the best of radical America. An essential part of that story is Wendell Berry. Few of us can live or even aspire to his kind of life. But nobody can risk ignoring him Andrew MarrWendell Berry is the most important writer and thinker that you have probably never heard of. He is an American sage James Rebanks author of The Shepherds Life Wendell Berry is something of an anachronism. He began his life as the old times and the last of the oldtime people were dying out and continues to this day in the old ways a team of work horses and a pencil are his preferred working tools. The writings gathered in The WorldEnding Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses and of the rich intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defence of the local landscapes that provide our cultural heritage our history our home.In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism Wendell Berry speaks out to defend the land we live on. With grace and conviction he shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the massproduced madness that drives our global economy. The natural world will not withstand it.Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle but we can and must begin to treat our land our neighbours and ourselves with respect and care. We must as Berry urges abandon arrogance and stand in awe.