Rating: 
Summary: Southern Schizophrenia
Review: As an expatriate Southerner, I admit that much of this work makes me a bit dewey-eyed, especially "Cousin Lucius." That said, the whole idea of the book is a foolishly romantic view of a mythical Southern Past. Every reasonably literate Southerner is familiar with Faulkner's line that "the past isn't dead, it isn't even past." I reject that. Southerners do not live with their past, they live with, one might say in, a mythically remembered past. The antebellum South was much more like Olmstead's critical descriptions than the happy place described by the slave-holding oligarchs. 300,000 mostly poor men died in the rich men's attempt to preserve their pretenses. In the aftermath, both the white and black poor of the South were sentenced to peonage for a century while the scions of the pre-war big men feasted on Yankee table scraps. That is the truth. The Agrarians describe a society they wanted to see because Southerners just couldn't bring themselves to see the ruin of poverty, ignorance, and xenophobia that surrounded them. Atlanta may indeed represent what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent. But there really wasn't an Atlanta as romantic Southerners want to remember it.
Rating: 
Summary: Rebuttal to the Fascist Moron from Zurich
Review: I felt I should take the time to respond to the ravings of the self-righteous, totalitarian imbecile who last reviewed this book. His assertion that the book is 'racist' because it doesn't include 'black views' of the South's agrarian tradition is moronic. The tradition being discussed in the book is one of small, private ownership of land, which in any agrarion society is the primary means of producing goods and thus, indirectly, of wealth. It is a pre-industrial version of the idea that wide ownership of capital is a pre-requisite for a good society - a notion proposed in more modern form in such books as "The Ownership Solution". It is thus by it's very nature opposed to the sort of massive agricultural operations invovled in running a plantation. This, of course, is why the previous reviewer's comments are so stupid - they literally have nothing whatsoever to do with the point of this book, but rather with an economic system utterly opposed to what the essays contained here espouse. Only one man in five in the South owned any slaves. To damn, as this idiot does, and entire people and way of life because of the crimes of their ruling class is the height of politically correct arrogance. Nowhere in his stupid ramblings are his totalitarian views better brought out than in his last comments, about how this book could not be published in his country of residence. This fool clearly considers this a good thing; anyone who believes in freedom of speech, in the right of people to hold unfashionable opinions, and indeed in the right of people to _think for themselves_ should recognize at once the beat of goose-stepping legions in the background when they read that retard's trash.
Rating: 
Summary: Southern Loss
Review: I was doing research on the Agrarians and was recommended this book. It was exceptionally helpful, as well as interesting!! I'll Take My Stand includes essays from 12 famous Agrarians: Ransom, Davidson, Owsley, Fletcher, Lanier, Tate, Nixon, Lytle, Warren, Wade, Kline, and Young. The 12 speak out against the changes that were occuring in the South at that time (after the Civil War). Topics include industrialism vs. agriculturalism, religion, education, art, etc. The book also contains an informational intro and conclusion. If you have no idea what an Agrarian is or what their beliefs are, this is the place to find out!! If you already know this and want to futher your knowledge, this, too, is the place to go! It was a big help to me.
Rating:
Summary: Southern Loss
Review: I was doing research on the Agrarians and was recommended this book. It was exceptionally helpful, as well as interesting!! I'll Take My Stand includes essays from 12 famous Agrarians: Ransom, Davidson, Owsley, Fletcher, Lanier, Tate, Nixon, Lytle, Warren, Wade, Kline, and Young. The 12 speak out against the changes that were occuring in the South at that time (after the Civil War). Topics include industrialism vs. agriculturalism, religion, education, art, etc. The book also contains an informational intro and conclusion. If you have no idea what an Agrarian is or what their beliefs are, this is the place to find out!! If you already know this and want to futher your knowledge, this, too, is the place to go! It was a big help to me.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Reading
Review: I would not go so far as to say any of these gentlemen is absolutely correct in their work, but this collection is extremely important if you want some understanding of the southern mind at the begining of the Great Depression. This is very much a regional book and will have little interest to anyone who isn't searching for some meaning from the South. It is great reading however. Although the essays in the book are not connected, the general theme is one of a general distrust of the modern industrial world where people have no connection to place and stable values and ideals. There is a definate feeling of longing for the agrarian South of old that was slowly slipping away at the time. Very interesting.
Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary collection of essays.
Review: In spite of the title (it comes from the chorus of "Dixie"), this book is not about the War, or a celebration of the Old South. It is rather a collection of essays in support of the Southern Agrarian movement centered at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and 30s. The unique thing about this book is the uniformly high literary quality of the essays. Take a look at the table of contents. One would be hard-pressed to find another collection of essays by such an ensemble of writers, poets, and historians. Anyone interested in who we are and how we got here as Americans should read this book.The views expressed in this book may not ultimately make sense when considered from the point of view of an economist. Nonetheless, after reading it, you'll wonder whether there might not have been an alternative to either the brutal, dehumanizing calculations of the socialists in their various guises, or the materialistic worship of progress and the almighty dollar that capitalism brings us. It is a book with an old-fashioned humanism and dignity that is seldom encountered anymore. The modern reader may be startled, for example, to be presented with the idea that education is something more than the vocational training it is today, but rather a course of personal development in which the pupil comes to understand his place and role in society, in which the pupil becomes cultured, if you will. Nowadays, "culture" means that we play Mozart to our children in utero, so that when ill-mannered little Brandon grows up, he'll be one leg up on the competition for that lucrative securities analyst job on Wall Street. I can well remember reading "The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius", from this book, in school growing up. Many of the essays stick with you, and stand up to multiple re-readings. Even if you don't agree with a call for a return to a rural, agrarian society (and I don't, but even that fact makes me sad after I read this book), it's well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Seminal
Review: In this age where the homogenization of our culture is nearly complete, thanks largely to widespread media and rampant industrialism, I'LL TAKE MY STAND remains as fresh and relevant as the day it was published more than seventy years ago. Instead of indulging in reactionary daydreams or nostalgia, as some of the book's less perceptive critics have claimed, the Twelve Southerners marshalled all their intellectual and literary powers to defend a way of life, rooted in the land and in the customs of small town living, that was very much in evidence prior to the War for Southern Independence and which really provided the anchor for the freedoms and liberties Americans enjoyed up to that time. Their criticisms circa 1930 have proven frighteningly prescient for our own times in which any individuality we might have as separate regions of a great nation have been almost entirely swallowed by mass production, mass culture, and centralized government. There are some truly astonishing pieces here, all forthright, honest, and so logically argued they are hard to refute. Among them I would cite Ransom's opening "Reconstructed but Unregenerate", Owsley's "The Irrepressible Conflict", and Lytle's "The Hind Tit." Most impressive of all is John Donald Wade's beautiful "The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius", really a novel encapsulated into little more than thirty pages, in which the Agrarian ideal is exemplified in the life (and death) of one simple Georgia farmer. Other essays I find less satisfactory if not downright obtuse - Tate's "Remarks on the Southern Religion" (disappointing and inconclusive by his normally high standards) and Stark Young's rather coy "Not in Memoriam, But in Defense." But even the lesser essays leave one much to think about and ponder over and worry about. You can scoff at the Twelve Southerners and consign them to the intellectual dustbin as daydreaming rednecks and mossbacks, but you do so at your own peril. In any event they should be read before they are condemned. And I predict they will be read a hundred years from now and beyond, so long as there are people concerned about the state of their communities, their liberties, and their own souls.
Rating:
Summary: Falling Just Short Isn't Good Enough
Review: One must keep in mind the time period of the book, which was the Great Depression. One must also remember that any kind of pervasive, endemic change on the scale of industrialism is bound to provoke a reaction. The stellar aspect of this book is the exhibition of a high order, intellectual critique of Modernism of a kind not usually originating from the South. Another stellar aspect of this book is the multitude of angles the attack is delivered from (historical, philosophical, religious, artistic). The one thing they all have in common is an astounding degree of rhetorical sophistication - these agrarians knew their adversary and were relentless in scourging it. For this, we owe them great thanks. That having been said, I doubt the Southern Agrarians could have ever conceived of man terraforming Mars, mining one of Jupiter's moons, or any of the things that we take for granted as inevitability. I never wish to be thought a better conservative than Edmund Burke, and he once remarked that when history has spoken, an opposing virtue may become not only immoral but perverse. It would seem that the record of history is against the agrarians. If man is to have the room and the land and the freedom they sought, it will have to be on the other side of the industrial Modernism they so hated and feared. Perhaps upon a green Mars, newly primed and ready for settlement?....
Rating:
Summary: Chillingly prophetic classic, must read for all Southerners
Review: The footnotes of so many books about the South reference this book that a visit to the source was inevitable. This book captures the best and worst of our Southern heritage. It is not a prescription for economics. It was environmental before the term was coined. It also portrays with poetic beauty at times the organic symmetry of a kinder gentler time when people were in tune with the rythmns of nature. Some of the essays are better than others and a couple are outright tomes. But there is a reason it has always been visited by any serious student of the South.
Rating:
Summary: Ned misses the point...remarkably so
Review: The previous review makes mention of the theme of this collection as "sentimental romanticism" and totally misses the point in the process. The fact that the reviewer is a Southerner (or at least southern educated) and doesn't have the ability to put these essays in proper context is disturbing. These essays provide a basis for comprehending the context of the consistent theme of Southern life, agrarianism. This is the nature of our origin and that which has shaped us as a culture and collective. Given the track of society and evaporation of regional and cultural distinction in our country over the past 30 years I guess it shouldn't surprise. This work does not represent a sentimental, romantic glance over the shoulder. It is a statement and muted plea for recognition of our roots and for strengthening what was then a weakening grasp of basic understanding. Given that Ned is educated and intelligent and yet fails to comprehend the concepts discussed, feeling that they are sentimental (out of touch), shows that we have lost something very precious along the way.
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