“ You will die but the words you speak or spoke will live forever. ” Auliq Ice
John Connell’s The Wisdom of Farmers: What We Can Learn from the Land is a thoughtful, illuminating rumination on the life lessons from those who work the land and the millennia of wisdom they draw upon when they go about their day, ‘making a living by turning light and time into money’. He skilfully synthesises philosophy, art, literature and spirituality to bolster his thoughts on such topics as stoicism, the food chain and the role of community.
The oldest written art form on the planet, in today’s world of disinformation and deepfakes, aphorisms point to the power of fresh debate over tired dogma and inconvenient truths over comfortable lies. Starting in ancient China, James Geary’s The World in A Phrase tells the story of the aphorism through some of its greatest practitioners, and shows why these short sentences are the ultimate deep dives in an era when TL;DR is a cultural catchphrase.
John Connell is a multi-award-winning author, film producer, investigative journalist and farmer. His documentary programs have won over a dozen international awards. His number-one bestselling memoir The Cow Book was awarded Popular Non Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. He lives on his family farm in County Longford, Ireland. James Geary, deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, is the author of Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It, and I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World.
In conversation with Gary Quinn.