NONFICTION - Dec. 24, 1995

ANOTHER TURN OF THE CRANK by Wendell Berry. (Counterpoint: $18; 109 pp.) After Wendell Berry’s last collection of essays, “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community,” I naively thought that the great cogitator/instigator had broken the envelope, had been as sarcastic and furious as a man who teaches by example could be and still retain an audience, but I was wrong. Reading Berry makes the sympathetic reader (the reader who already believes that our lives have run amok, too far from nature, too cruel to nature and to each other, too centralized and altogether victimized by big government, big institutions and big machines) feel that our choice is either to rebel or to lie down and fold in. Berry has several helpful suggestions for rebelling--for example, the “adversary economy,” a system of local economies to protect consumers and producers against the “would-be global economy.” The book glimmers here and there with the not-so-small triumphs of individuals over the timber industry, over the rising cost of inefficiently produced and imported food or over the inhumanity of hospitals. Another glimmer combusts as Berry plays throughout the essays with the idea of intimacy: “True intimacy, in work, as in love, means lifelong commitment;” as it is created and nurtured in various contexts; community, marriage, farming and forestry, to name only a few.