BOOKPATHS

Kentucky

“Wendell Berry joins retired coal miners and residents in Kentucky Rising Capitol sit-in.”

‘This is not something we’re doing for pleasure,’ said Berry, who has been active in the movement to abolish mountaintop removal mining for years. ‘We’re doing it because it’s the next thing to do after all our attempts to attract serious attention to these problems have failed.’

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site, Kentucky, U.S

Focusing on Lincoln’s life in Kentucky, the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site, explores the time and place that “helped mold a young boy into the man who became the nation’s sixteenth President.”  You’ll find visitor information, including Bicentennial events, on the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site website.

(National Parks photograph)

Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.

Kim Edwards explains how she discovered “a new sense of home” in Lexington.

Though Lexington is not a small town, it sometimes feels like one, with circles of acquaintance overlapping once, then again; the person you meet by chance at the library or the pool may turn out to be the best friend of your down-the-street neighbor. Maybe that's why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried. After all, you don't want to engage in road rage when the person in the next car might be your child's future teacher or your dentist's father. There's a graciousness that informs life here, which I remember from my childhood, too. – from “Lexington is Kim Edwards’ Old Kentucky Home,” Smithsonian Magazine

Kentucky

The Memory of Old Jack, by Wendell Berry (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999; first published 1974)

Set in the Kentucky landscape Wendell Berry knows best on a September day in 1952, The Memory of Old Jack focuses on retired 92-year-old farmer Jack Beechum as he remembers his life.  Memories, “too old to work and get around, he can do nothing but let [them] come,” flood back to him, of family, friends, work, youth, aging, joy, despair, and always the land.  Gorgeously written, tender, poignant, The Memory of Old Jack will stay with you long after the last page is read.

In 1888 he was twenty-eight years old.  Three years before, both his parents dead, the older children dead or gone from home, he bought from its other heirs the land his father and grandfather had farmed, and on which he had been born, and, several years yet away from his marriage, he lived alone in the old house; an elderly Negro woman, Aunt Ren, the wife of the hired hand who had been his father’s slave, came in daily to cook and to keep the mostly forsaken rooms.  The place was run down, the bank’s interest having fed heavily on it during the father’s last years, and the debt against it was large.  But in those days Jack was free of other obligations, he was strong, he had the sort of overreaching intelligence that pleases itself with the difficult, and so hardship and debt did not burden him.  What moved him then was a sense of the possibilities that lay yet untouched in his land.  The rest of his own life seemed to him to lie there, unborn in the dark soil of the old farm. – from The Memory of Old Jack, by Wendell Berry

Kentucky

Of Woods and Water : a Kentucky Outdoors Reader, Ron Ellis, editor (Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, September 2005)

The University Press of Kentucky has published Of Woods and Water : a Kentucky Outdoors Reader, “the first book of its kind to celebrate the Kentucky outdoors.” Ron Ellis has chosen fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that reflect Kentucky’s “unique vision…of land and life.” In its pages you’ll find the words of Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Barbara Kingslover, Jesse Stuart, Harriette Arnow, Silas House, Robert Penn Warren, and others. Kentucky artists also contribute with work by Harlan Hubbard, Rick Hill, and Paul Sawyier. The selections in Of Woods and Water : a Kentucky Outdoors Reader share the love Kentucky writers feel for their native or adopted state. Through them we, too, can see this landscape of woods and water.

See The University Press of Kentucky website for additional information on Of Woods and Water : a Kentucky Outdoors Reader.