Cumberlands Book Club - Hannah Culter

After reading 2 somewhat edgy and experimental novels, the UC Book Club returns to Kentucky literary roots on Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 4:30 pm via Google Meet to discuss Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry.

Berry weaves his renowned themes of love of land, honor for the small family farm, and disdain of modern technology into the 2005 novel Hannah Coulter, part of what the author called the Port William membership.  Hannah now as an elderly woman recounts her life with what The California Literary Review calls "the truth of an inherent wisdom” coming from old age.  Kirkuscalls the novel “a kind of elegy for the starkly beautiful country life” that disappears through the twentieth century.  In her reflection of Berry after his death, fellow Kentucky writer Barbara Kingsolver writes of her mentor, “He could deliver [rightness] on the page with such lyrical self possession, the reader might take a while to register the volley of interior explosions.” 

And coming up in December TBA will be Falling Upward, Revised and Updated: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr. Using the contrasts of “up” and “down,” the author, a Franciscan friar, argues that we do ourselves a disservice by viewing the second half of life as a time when health and vigor decrease. 

By encouraging readers to “fall up,” Rohr shows people of any age how they can confront the struggles of life with strength and love.  Marian Aldridge writing for Baptist News Global proclaims that Falling Upward “is the best book I have read in a decade.”  This reviewer highlights Rohr’s concept of the “’loyal soldier,’” who learns to find their own “mature faith,” and the “double belonger” who is mature enough to worship alongside those who have opposing ideologies.  Lauren F. Winner writing in The Christian Century calls the book both "sage” and "important."