"With this revised edition of A Place on Earth, we add a major installment to our uniform series of books about "The Port William Membership." The central character is not a person but a place: Port William, Kentucky, the farm lands and forests that surround it and the Kentucky River that runs nearby. This is a region that Wendell Berry knows intimately, with both heart and mind, a region whose faults and virtues he has spent a lifetime learning."--BOOK...

This, the first title in the Port William series, introduces the rural section of Kentucky with which novelist Wendell Berry has had a lifelong fascination. When young Nathan loses his grandfather, Berry guides listeners through the process of Nathan's grief, endearing the listener to the simple humanity through which Nathan views the world. Echoing Berry's own strongly held beliefs, Nathan tells us that his grandfather's life 'couldn't be divided...

At the age of 60, a Kentucky man decides to find out why half a century earlier his favorite uncle was shot, a crime for which the killer spent only two years in jail. The man was nine years old when the incident occurred and nobody would give him a reason.

In the latest installment in Wendell Berry's long story about the citizens of Port William, Hannah Coulter remembers. Her first husband, Virgil, was declared "missing in action" shortly after the Battle of the Bulge, and after she married Nathan Coulter about all he could tell Hannah about the Battle of Okinawa was "Ignorant boys, killing each other." The community was stunned and diminished by the war, with some of its sons lost forever and others...

"At the age of eighty, Andy Catlett is preparing himself to join the whole Membership of Port William, which includes those alive as well as those departed who still seem vividly alive. As he looks back on his own life through thirteen stories that range from his earliest childhood memories to the present day, from 1945 to 2001, How It Went reveals Andy at his most loving and retrospective, coming to the end of his days surrounded by the love and...