A Printable Reader's Guide to The Unsettling of America

The Wild Gentleman Book Club

This is the one-page reader's guide for the table at The Wild Gentleman Book Club in-person meeting. For the full guide, with background on the book and why it matters for men, see The Unsettling of America: A Reader's Guide.

Key Themes for Discussion

• The Exploiter and the Nurturer. Berry's strip miner and farmer stand for two ways of living: take what the world yields, or tend it so it keeps yielding. "The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care." Berry is both frustrated and confused that one person destroying the world gets sympathy and appreciation while the other nurturing the earth gets disdain and misunderstanding.
• The Specialist Man. Competent, well paid, and almost completely dependent. Berry thinks we traded our wholeness for expertise. "To be healthy is to be whole." The problem is that with so many experts, everyone is right about their own niche, yet no one has the general experience and knowledge to have global wisdom.
• Staying Put. A man who never stays anywhere long enough to belong can't take care of anything. In "The Body and the Earth," Berry carries this all the way home to marriage and the household. He makes his point that there is no way for there to be both "material order" and "spiritual disorder" in the world: "It is impossible, for instance, to conceive that a man could despise women and yet love his wife, or love his own place in the world and yet deal destructively with other places."

Questions to explore:

1. Berry says the exploiter's standard is efficiency and the nurturer's is care. Which standard runs your working life, efficiency or care? Which runs your home? Are they the same?
2. Where are you mining something (your body, a friendship, a marriage, a place) instead of tending to it?
3. Berry says the crisis of community starts in character, not policy. Do you believe he is right?
4. What have you outsourced that your father or grandfather did for himself? What was lost, for you, experience-wise when you offloaded the task or undertaking?
5. What part of your life have you relegated to others or technology, and what would it take to bring it back? (AI? Health? Food? Connection?)
6. Most of us make a living as specialists in our field. Can you find the success you need in the world of specialists and find the balance Berry finds in farm life?
7. When did you last leave something for opportunity? When did you choose to stay? What did each cost?
8. How do you understand Berry's thoughts on working and living in the same, local space? Is that even possible anymore?
9. How does Berry tie the experiences of marriage and home life to his greater argument on the unsettledness of the modern world?
10. In terms of working and living in a home space, are there more opportunities to do that as more jobs can be done remotely through technology?
11. Has life since the pandemic changed perspectives on working in your home?
12. "If we do not live where we work and when we work, we are wasting our lives and our work too." What version of that is available to a man in the suburbs in 2026?

Didn't finish the entire book? Two good parts to read are "The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character" and "The Body and the Earth." Or, just come along anyway.

Printable Reader's Guide:

The Unsettling of America: A Reader's Guide for The Wild Gentleman Book Club